“You are the media now.” That’s the message that began to cohere among right-wing influencers shortly after Donald Trump won the election this week. Elon Musk first posted the phrase, and others followed. “The legacy media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth telling is in. No more complaining about the media,” the right-wing activist James O’Keefe posted shortly after. “You are the media.”

It’s a particularly effective message for Musk, who spent $44 billion to purchase a communications platform that he has harnessed to undermine existing media institutions and directly support Trump’s campaign. QAnon devotees also know the phrase as a rallying cry, an invitation to participate in a particular kind of citizen “journalism” that involves just asking questions and making stuff up altogether.

“You are the media now” is also a good message because, well, it might be true.

A defining quality of this election cycle has been that few people seem to be able to agree on who constitutes “the media,” what their role ought to be, or even how much influence they have in 2024. Based on Trump and Kamala Harris’s appearances on various shows—and especially Trump and J. D. Vance’s late-race interviews with Joe Rogan, which culminated in the popular host’s endorsement—some have argued that this was the “podcast election.” But there’s broad confusion over what actually moves the needle. Is the press the bulwark against fascism, or is it ignored by a meaningful percentage of the country? It is certainly beleaguered by a conservative effort to undermine media institutions, with Trump as its champion and the fracturing caused by algorithmic social media. It can feel existential at times competing for attention and reckoning with the truth that many Americans don’t read, trust, or really care all that much about what papers, magazines, or cable news have to say.

All of this contributes to a well-documented, slow-moving crisis of legacy media—a cocktail whose ingredients also include declining trust, bad economics, political pressure, vulture capitalists, the rise of the internet, and no shortage of coverage decisions from mainstream institutions that have alienated or infuriated some portion of their audiences. Each and every one of these things affected how Americans experienced this election, though it is impossible to say what the impact is in aggregate. If “you are the media,” then there is no longer a consensus reality informed by what audiences see and hear: Everyone chooses their own adventure.

[Read: The great social-media news collapse]

The confusion felt most palpable in the days following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June. I noticed conflicting complaints from liberals online: Some argued that until that point, the media had failed to cover Biden’s age out of fear of crossing some editorial redline, while others said the media were now recklessly engaged in a coordinated effort to oust the president, shamefully crusading against his age. Then, Biden’s administration leveled its own critique: “I want you to ask yourself, what have these people been right about lately?” it wrote in an email. “Seriously. Think about it.” Everyone seemed frustrated for understandable reasons. But there was no coherence to be found in this moment: The media were either powerful and incompetent or naive and irrelevant … or somehow both.

The vibe felt similar around The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse Harris in the final weeks of the race after the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, intervened and shut the effort down. Readers were outraged by the notion that one of the world’s richest men was capitulating to Trump: The paper reportedly lost at least 250,000 subscribers, or 10 percent of its digital base, in just a handful of days following the decision.

But even that signal was fuzzy. The endorsement was never going to change the election’s outcome. As many people, including Bezos himself, argued, newspaper endorsements don’t matter. The writer Max Read noted that Bezos’s intervention was its own indicator of the Post’s waning relevance. “As a journalist, you don’t actually want your publication to be used as a political weapon for a billionaire,” Read wrote. “But it would be nice for your publication to be so powerful and unavoidable that a billionaire might try.” This tension was everywhere throughout campaign season: Media institutions were somehow failing to meet the moment, but it was also unclear if they still had any meaningful power to shape outcomes at all.

I’ve watched for the past year with grim fascination as both the media industry and its audience have sparred and tried to come to some shared understanding of what the hell is going on. The internet destroyed monoculture years ago, but as I wrote last December, it’s recently felt harder to know what anyone else is doing, seeing, or hearing online anymore.

News sites everywhere have seen traffic plummet in the past two years. That’s partly the fault of technology companies and their algorithmic changes, which have made people less likely to see or click on articles when using products like Google Search or Facebook. But research suggests that isn’t the entire story: Audiences are breaking up with news, too. An influencer economy has emerged on social-media platforms. It’s not an ecosystem that produces tons of original reporting, but it feels authentic to its audience.

Traditional journalism operates with a different playbook, typically centered on strong ethical norms and a spirit of objectivity; the facts are meant to anchor the story, even where commentary is concerned. This has presented challenges in the Trump era, which has produced genuine debates about whether traditional objectivity is possible or useful. Some audiences crave obvious resistance against the Republican regime. Outlets such as the The New York Times have tried to forge a middle path—to be, in executive editor Joe Kahn’s words, a “nonpartisan source of information” that occupies a “neutral middle ground” without devolving into “both-sides journalism.” This has had the unfortunate effect of downplaying the asymmetries between candidates and putting detached, clinical language onto politics that feel primal and urgent. When it comes to covering Trump, critics of the Times see double standards and a “sanewashing” of his alarming behavior.

Independent online creators aren’t encumbered by any of this hand-wringing over objectivity or standards: They are concerned with publishing as much as they can, in order to cultivate audiences and build relationships with them. For them, posting is a volume game. It’s also about working ideas out in public. Creators post and figure it out later; if they make mistakes, they post through it. Eventually people forget. When I covered the rise of the less professionalized pro-Trump media in 2016, what felt notable to me was its allergy to editing. These people livestreamed and published unpolished three-hour podcasts. It’s easier to build a relationship with people when you’re in their ears 15 hours a week: Letting it all hang out can feel more authentic, like you have nothing to hide.

Critics can debate whether this kind of content is capital-J Journalism until the heat death of the universe, but the undeniable truth is that people, glued to their devices, like to consume information when it’s informally presented via parasocial relationships with influencers. They enjoy frenetic, algorithmically curated short-form video, streaming and long-form audio, and the feeling that only a slight gap separates creator and consumer. Major media outlets are trying to respond to this shift: The Times’ online front page, for example, has started to feature reporters in what amounts to prestige TikToks.

Yet the influencer model is also deeply exploitable. One of the most aggressive attempts to interfere in this election didn’t come directly from operators in Russia, but rather from a legion of useful idiots in the United States. Russia simply used far-right influencers to do their bidding with the large audiences they’d already acquired.

[Read: YouTubers are almost too easy to dupe]

Watching this from inside the media, I’ve experienced two contradicting feelings. First is a kind of powerlessness from working in an industry with waning influence amid shifting consumption patterns. The second is the notion that the craft, rigor, and mission of traditional journalism matter more than ever. Recently I was struck by a line from the Times’ Ezra Klein. “The media doesn’t actually set the agenda the way people sometimes pretend that it does,” he said late last month. “The audience knows what it believes. If you are describing something they don’t really feel is true, they read it, and they move on. Or they don’t read it at all.” Audiences vote with their attention, and that attention is the most important currency for media businesses, which, after all, need people to care enough to scroll past ads and pony up for subscriptions.

It is terribly difficult to make people care about things they don’t already have an interest in—especially if you haven’t nurtured the trust necessary to lead your audience. As a result, news organizations frequently take cues from what they perceive people will be interested in. This often means covering people who already attract a lot of attention, under the guise of newsworthiness. (Trump and Musk are great examples of people who have sufficiently hijacked this system.) This is why there can be a herding effect in coverage.

Numerous media critics and theorists on Threads and Bluesky, themselves subject to the incentives of the attention economy, balked at Klein’s perspective, citing historical social-science research that media organizations absolutely influence political metanarratives. They’re right, too. When the press coheres around a narrative that also manages to capture the public’s attention, it can have great influence. But these people weren’t just disagreeing with Klein: They were angry with him. “Another one of those ‘we’re just a smol bean national paper of record’ excuses when part of the issue was how they made Biden’s age the top story day after day after day,” one historian posted.

These arguments over media influence—specifically the Times’—occurred frequently on social media throughout the election cycle, and occasionally, a reporter would offer a rebuttal. “To think The Times has influence with Trump voters or even swing voters is to fundamentally misunderstand the electorate,” the Times political reporter Jonathan Weisman posted in October. “And don’t say The Times influences other outlets that do reach those voters. It’s not true.” The argument is meant to suggest that newspaper coverage alone cannot stop a popular authoritarian movement. At the same time, these defenses inevitably led critics to argue: Do you think what you do matters or not?

In a very real sense, these are all problems that the media created for itself. As Semafor’s Ben Smith argued last month, discussing the period following Trump’s 2016 win, “a whole generation of non-profit and for-profit newsrooms held out their hands to an audience that wanted to support a cause, not just to purchase a service.” These companies sold democracy itself and a vision of holding Trump’s power to account. “The thing with marketing, though,” Smith continued, “is that you eventually have to deliver what you sold.” Trump’s win this week may very well be the proof that critics and beleaguered citizens need to stop writing those checks.

A subscription falloff would also highlight the confusing logic of this era for the media. It would mean that the traditional media industry—fractured, poorly funded, constantly under attack, and in competition with attention gatherers who don’t have to play by the same rules—is simultaneously viewed as having had enough power to stop Trump, but also past its prime, having lost its sway and relevance. Competition is coming from a durable alternative-media ecosystem, the sole purpose of which is to ensconce citizens in their chosen reality, regardless of whether it’s true. And it is coming from Musk’s X, which the centibillionaire quickly rebuilt into a powerful communication tool that largely serves the MAGA coalition.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

Spaces like X offer an environment for toxic ideas paired with a sense of empowerment for disaffected audiences. This is part of what Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington, calls the right’s “powerful, partisan, & participatory media environment to support its messaging, which offers a compelling ‘deep story’ for its participants.” By contrast, the left’s media ecosystem, she argues, relies “upon rigid, self-preserving institutional media and its ‘story’ is little more than a defense of imperfect institutions.” The right’s media ecosystem might be chaotic, conspiracist, and poisonous, but it offers its consumers a world to get absorbed in—plus, the promise that they can shape it themselves.

Would it have been possible for things to go differently if Harris had attempted to tap into this alternative ecosystem? I’m not so sure. Following Harris’s entrance into the race, each passing week felt more consequential, but more rigidly locked in place. Memes, rallies, and marathon podcast appearances from Trump offered data points, but there was no real way to interpret them. Some Zoomers and Millennials were ironically coconut-pilled; people were leaving Trump rallies early; everyone was arguing about who was actually garbage. Even when something seemed to matter, it was hard to tell whom it mattered to, or what might happen because of it. When it’s unclear what information everyone is consuming or which filter bubble they’re trapped in, everyone tends to shadowbox their conception of an imagined audience. Will the Rogan bros vote? Did a stand-up comedian’s insult activate a groundswell of Puerto-Rican American support? We didn’t really know anything for certain until we did.

“You are the media now” is powerful because it capitalizes on the reality that it is difficult to know where genuine influence comes from these days. The phrase sounds empowering. Musk’s acolytes see it as the end of traditional-media gatekeeping. But what he’s really selling is the notion that people are on their own—that facts are malleable, and that what feels true ought to be true.

A world governed by the phrase do your own research is also a world where the Trumps and Musks can operate with impunity. Is it the news media’s job to counter this movement—its lies, its hate? Is it also their job to appeal to some of the types of people who listen to Joe Rogan? I’d argue that it is. But there’s little evidence right now that it stands much of a chance.

Something has to change. Perhaps it’s possible to appropriate “You are the media now” and use it as a mission statement to build an industry more capable of meeting whatever’s coming. Perhaps in the absence of a shared reality, fighting against an opposing information ecosystem isn’t as effective as giving more people a reason to get excited about, and pay attention to, yours.

Donald Trump has won, and will become president for the second time. Those who voted for him will now celebrate their victory. The rest of us need to prepare to live in a different America: a country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.  

Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country.

When he was last in the White House, the president-elect ignored ethics and security guidelines, fired inspectors general and other watchdogs, leaked classified information, and used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, deploying U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Coast Guard “troops” in American cities. Trump actively encouraged the January 6, 2021, insurrection at our Capitol. When he left the White House, he stole classified documents and hid them from the FBI.  

Because a critical mass of Americans aren’t bothered by that list of transgressions, any one of which would have tanked the career of another politician, Trump and his vice president–elect, J.D. Vance, will now try to transform the federal government into a loyalty machine that serves the interests of himself and his cronies. This was the essence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and its architects, all Trump fans, will now endeavor to make it become reality. Trump will surely try again to dismantle America’s civil service, replacing qualified scientists and regulators with partisan operatives. His allies will help him to build a Department of Justice that does not serve the Constitution, but instead focuses on harassing and punishing Trump’s enemies. Trump has spoken, in the past, of using the Federal Communications Commission and the Internal Revenue Service to punish media organizations and anyone else who crosses him, and now he will have the chance to try again.

[Read: The Democrats’ dashed hopes in Iowa]

Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too. This is not just a theoretical threat. As loyalists take over regulatory agencies, filling not only political but also former civil-service jobs, American skies will become more polluted, American food more dangerous. As a result of this massive shift in the country’s bureaucratic culture, Trump-connected companies will prosper, even as America becomes less safe for consumers, for workers, for children, for all of us.

American foreign policy will also reflect this shift toward kleptocracy. In his first term, Trump abused the powers of his office, corrupting American foreign policy for his personal gain. He pressured the Ukrainian president to launch a fake investigation of his political opponent; altered policy toward Turkey, Qatar, and other nations in ways that suited his business interests; even used the Secret Service to funnel government money to his private properties. In a second term, he and the people around him will have every incentive to go much further. Expect them to use American foreign policy and military power to advance their personal and political goals.  

There are many things a re-elected President Trump cannot do. But there are some things he can do. One is to cut off aid to Ukraine. The Biden administration has three months to drop all half-measures and rush supplies to Ukraine before Trump forces a Ukrainian surrender to Russia. If there’s anything in the American arsenal that Ukraine might successfully use—other than nuclear weapons—send it now, before it’s too late.

Another thing Trump can do is to impose further tariffs–and intensify a global trade war against not only China but also against former friends, partners, and allies. America First will be America Alone, no longer Ronald Reagan’s “city on a hill,” but now just another great power animated by predatory nationalism.

Around the world, illiberal politicians who seek to subvert their own democracies will follow America’s lead. With no fear of American criticism or reaction, expect harassment of press and political opponents in countries such as Mexico and Turkey to grow. Expect the Russian-backed electoral cheating recently on display in Georgia and Moldova to spread. Expect violent rhetoric in every democracy: If the American president can get away with it, others will conclude that they can too. The autocratic world, meanwhile, will celebrate the victory of someone whose disdain for the rule of law echoes and matches their own. They can assume Trump and Vance will not promote human rights, will not care about international law, and will not reinforce our democratic alliances in Europe and Asia.

But the most difficult, most agonizing changes are the ones that will now take place deep inside our society. Radicalization of a part of the anti-Trump camp is inevitable, as people begin to understand that existential issues, such as climate change and gun violence, will not be tackled. A parallel process will take place on the other side of the political spectrum, as right-wing militias, white supremacists, and QAnon cultists are reenergized by the election of the man whose behavior they have, over eight years, learned to imitate. The deep gaps within America will grow deeper. Politics will become even angrier. Trump won by creating division and hatred, and he will continue to do so throughout what is sure to be a stormy second term.

[David A. Graham: The institutions failed]

My generation was raised on the belief America could always be counted upon to do the right thing, even if belatedly: reject the isolationism of America First and join the fight against Nazism; fund the Marshall Plan to stop communism; extend the promise of democracy to all people without regard to race or sex. But maybe that belief was true only for a specific period, a unique moment. There were many chapters of history when America did the wrong thing for years or decades. Maybe we are living through such a period now.

Or maybe the truth is that democracy is always a close-run thing, always in contention. If so, then we too must—as people in other failing democracies have learned to do—find new ways to champion wobbling institutions and threatened ideas. For supporters of the American experiment in liberal democracy, our only hope is education, organization, and the creation of a coalition of people dedicated to defending the spirit of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founders, the dream of freedom. More concretely: public civic-education campaigns to replace the lessons no longer taught in schools; teams of lawyers who can fight for the rule of law in courts; grassroots organizing, especially in rural and small-town America; citizens and journalists working to expose and fight the enormous wave of kleptocracy and corruption that will now engulf our political system.

Many of those shattered by this result will be tempted to withdraw into passivity—or recoil into performative radicalism. Reject both. We should focus, instead, on how to win back to the cause of liberal democracy a sufficient number of those Americans who voted for a candidate who denigrated this nation’s institutions and ideals.

X has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then de-verification) of a white nationalist, and the glut of anti-Semitic hatred that roiled the platform in 2016.

But something is different today. Heaps of unfiltered posts that plainly celebrate racism, anti-Semitism, and outright Nazism are easily accessible and possibly even promoted by the site’s algorithms. All the while, Elon Musk—a far-right activist and the site’s owner, who is campaigning for and giving away millions to help elect Donald Trump—amplifies horrendous conspiracy theories about voter fraud, migrants run amok, and the idea that Jewish people hate white people. Twitter was always bad if you knew where to look, but because of Musk, X is far worse. (X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

It takes little effort to find neo-Nazi accounts that have built up substantial audiences on X. “Thank you all for 7K,” one white-nationalist meme account posted on October 17, complete with a heil-Hitler emoji reference. One week later, the account, which mostly posts old clips of Hitler speeches and content about how “Hitler was right,” celebrated 14,000 followers. One post, a black-and-white video of Nazis goose-stepping, has more than 187,000 views. Another racist and anti-Semitic video about Jewish women and Black men—clearly AI-generated—has more than 306,000 views. It was also posted in late October.

Many who remain on the platform have noticed X decaying even more than usual in recent months. “I’ve seen SO many seemingly unironic posts like this on Twitter recently this is getting insane,” one X user posted in response to a meme that the far-right influencer Stew Peters recently shared. It showed an image of Adolf Hitler holding a telephone with overlaid text reading, “Hello … 2024? Are you guys starting to get it yet?” Peters appended the commentary, “Yes. We’ve noticed.” The idea is simply that Hitler was right, and X users ate it up: As of this writing, the post has received about 67,000 likes, 10,000 reposts, and 11.4 million views. When Musk took over, in 2022, there were initial reports that hate speech (anti-Black and anti-Semitic slurs) was surging on the platform. By December of that year, one research group described the increase in hate speech as “unprecedented.” And it seems to only have gotten worse. There are far more blatant examples of racism now, even compared with a year ago. In September, the World Bank halted advertising on X after its promoted ads were showing up in the replies to pro-Nazi and white-nationalist content from accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Search queries such as Hitler was right return posts with tens of thousands of views—they’re indistinguishable from the poison once relegated to the worst sites on the internet, including 4chan, Gab, and Stormfront.

The hatred isn’t just coming from anonymous fringe posters either. Late last month, Clay Higgins, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, published a racist, threatening post about the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, saying they’re from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Then he issued an ultimatum: “All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th,” he wrote in the post, referencing Inauguration Day. Higgins eventually deleted the post at the request of his House colleagues on both sides of the aisle but refused to apologize. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want,” he told CNN later that day.

And although Higgins did eventually try to walk his initial post back, clarifying that he was really referring to Haitian gangs, the sentiment he shared with CNN is right. The lawmaker can put up another vile post maligning an entire country whenever he desires. Not because of his right to free speech—which exists to protect against government interference—but because of how Musk chooses to operate his platform. Despite the social network’s policy that prohibits “incitement of harassment,” X seemingly took no issue with Higgins’s racist post or its potential to cause real-world harm for Springfield residents. (The town has already closed and evacuated its schools twice because of bomb threats.) And why would X care? The platform, which reinstated thousands of banned accounts following Musk’s takeover, in 2022—accounts that belong to QAnon supporters, political hucksters, conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi—is so inundated with bigoted memes, racist AI slop, and unspeakable slurs that Higgins’s post seemed almost measured by comparison. In the past, when Twitter seemed more interested in enforcing content-moderation standards, the lawmaker’s comments may have resulted in a ban or some other disciplinary response: On X, he found an eager, sympathetic audience willing to amplify his hateful message.

His deleted post is instructive, though, as a way to measure the degradation of X under Musk. The site is a political project run by a politically radicalized centibillionaire. The worthwhile parts of Twitter (real-time news, sports, culture, silly memes, spontaneous encounters with celebrity accounts) have been drowned out by hateful garbage. X is no longer a social-media site with a white-supremacy problem, but a white-supremacist site with a social-media problem.

Musk has certainly bent the social network to support his politics, which has recently involved joking on Tucker Carlson’s show (which streams on X) that “nobody is even bothering to try to kill Kamala” and repurposing the @america handle from an inactive user to turn it into a megaphone for his pro-Trump super PAC. Musk has also quite clearly reengineered the site so that users see him, and his tweets, whether or not they follow him.

When Musk announced his intent to purchase Twitter, in April 2022, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein aptly noted that “Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it.” By this logic, it would seem that X is vying to be the official propaganda outlet not just for Trump generally but also for the “Great Replacement” theory, which states that there is a global plot to eradicate the white race and its culture through immigration. In just the past year, Musk has endorsed multiple posts about the conspiracy theory. In November 2023, in response to a user named @breakingbaht who accused Jews of supporting bringing “hordes of minorities” into the United States, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.” Musk’s post was viewed more than 8 million times.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government]

Though Musk has publicly claimed that he doesn’t “subscribe” to the “Great Replacement” theory, he appears obsessed with the idea that Republican voters in America are under attack from immigrants. Last December, he posted a misleading graph suggesting that the number of immigrants arriving illegally was overtaking domestic birth rates. He has repeatedly referenced a supposed Democratic plot to “legalize vast numbers of illegals” and put an end to fair elections. He has falsely suggested that the Biden administration was “flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona” and argued that, soon, “everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.” According to a recent Bloomberg analysis of 53,000 of Musk’s posts, the billionaire has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic (more than 1,300 posts in total), garnering roughly 10 billion views.

But Musk’s interests extend beyond the United States. This summer, during a period of unrest and rioting in the United Kingdom over a mass stabbing that killed three children, the centibillionaire used his account to suggest that a civil war there was “inevitable.” He also shared (and subsequently deleted) a conspiracy theory that the U.K. government was building detainment camps for people rioting against Muslims. Additionally, X was instrumental in spreading misinformation and fueling outrage among far-right, anti-immigration protesters.

In Springfield, Ohio, X played a similar role as a conduit for white supremacists and far-right extremists to fuel real-world harm. One of the groups taking credit for singling out Springfield’s Haitian community was Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group known for marching through city streets waving swastikas. Blood Tribe had been focused on the town for months, but not until prominent X accounts (including Musk’s, J. D. Vance’s, and Trump’s) seized on a Facebook post from the region did Springfield become a national target. “It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against ‘subhuman’ Haitians,” the journalist Robert Tracinski wrote recently. Tracinski argues that social-media channels (like X) have been instrumental in transferring neo-Nazi propaganda into the public consciousness—all the way to the presidential-debate stage. He is right. Musk’s platform has become a political tool for stoking racial hatred online and translating it into harassment in the physical world.

The ability to drag fringe ideas and theories into mainstream political discourse has long been a hallmark of X, even back when it was known as Twitter. There’s always been a trade-off with the platform’s ability to narrow the distance between activists and people in positions of power. Social-justice movements such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter owe some of the success of their early organizing efforts to the platform.

Yet the website has also been one of the most reliable mainstream destinations on the internet to see Photoshopped images of public figures (or their family members) in gas chambers, or crude, racist cartoons of Jewish men. Now, under Musk’s stewardship, X seems to run in only one direction. The platform eschews healthy conversation. It abhors nuance, instead favoring constant escalation and engagement-baiting behavior. And it empowers movements that seek to enrage and divide. In April, an NBC News investigation found that “at least 150 paid ‘Premium’ subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months.” According to research from the extremism expert Colin Henry, since Musk’s purchase, there’s been a decline in anti-Semitic posts on 4chan’s infamous “anything goes” forum, and a simultaneous rise in posts targeting Jewish people on X.

X’s own transparency reports show that the social network has allowed hateful content to flourish on its site. In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

Because X has made it more difficult for researchers to access data by switching to a paid plan that prices out many academics, it is now difficult to get a quantitative understanding of the platform’s degradation. The statistics that do exist are alarming. Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in just the first month of Musk’s ownership, anti–Black American slurs used on the platform increased by 202 percent. The Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic tweets on the platform increased by 61 percent in just two weeks after Musk’s takeover. But much of the evidence is anecdotal. The Washington Post summed up a recent report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noting that pro-Hitler content “reached the largest audiences on X [relative to other social-media platforms], where it was also most likely to be recommended via the site’s algorithm.” Since Musk took over, X has done the following:

Seemingly failed to block a misleading advertisement post purchased by Jason Köhne, a white nationalist with the handle @NoWhiteGuiltNWG. Seemingly failed to block an advertisement calling to reinstate the death penalty for gay people. Reportedly run ads on 20 racist and anti-Semitic hashtags, including #whitepower, despite Musk pledging that he would demonetize posts that included hate speech. (After NBC asked about these, X removed the ability for users to search for some of these hashtags.) Granted blue-check verification to an account with the N-word in its handle. (The account has since been suspended.) Allowed an account that praised Hitler to purchase a gold-check badge, which denotes an “official organization” and is typically used by brands such as Doritos and BlackRock. (This account has since been suspended.) Seemingly failed to take immediate action on 63 of 66 accounts flagged for disseminating AI-generated Nazi memes from 4chan. More than half of the posts were made by paid accounts with verified badges, according to research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

None of this is accidental. The output of a platform tells you what it is designed to do: In X’s case, all of this is proof of a system engineered to give voice to hateful ideas and reward those who espouse them. If one is to judge X by its main exports, then X, as it exists now under Musk, is a white-supremacist website.

You might scoff at this notion, especially if you, like me, have spent nearly two decades willingly logged on to the site, or if you, like me, have had your professional life influenced in surprising, occasionally delightful ways by the platform. Even now, I can scroll through the site’s algorithmic pond scum and find things worth saving—interesting commentary, breaking news, posts and observations that make me laugh. But these exceptional morsels are what make the platform so insidious, in part because they give cover to the true political project that X now represents and empowers.

As I was preparing to write this story, I visited some of the most vile corners of the internet. I’ve monitored these spaces for years, and yet this time, I was struck by how little distance there was between them and what X has become. It is impossible to ignore: The difference between X and a known hateful site such as Gab are people like myself. The majority of users are no doubt creators, businesses, journalists, celebrities, political junkies, sports fans, and other perfectly normal people who hold their nose and cling to the site. We are the human shield of respectability that keeps Musk’s disastrous $44 billion investment from being little more than an algorithmically powered Stormfront.

The justifications—the lure of the community, the (now-limited) ability to bear witness to news in real time, and of the reach of one’s audience of followers—feel particularly weak today. X’s cultural impact is still real, but its promotional use is nonexistent. (A recent post linking to a story of mine generated 289,000 impressions and 12,900 interactions, but only 948 link clicks—a click rate of roughly 0.00328027682 percent.) NPR, which left the platform in April 2023, reported almost negligible declines in traffic referrals after abandoning the site.

Continuing to post on X has been indefensible for some time. But now, more than ever, there is no good justification for adding one’s name to X’s list of active users. To leave the platform, some have argued, is to cede an important ideological battleground to the right. I’ve been sympathetic to this line of thinking, but the battle, on this particular platform, is lost. As long as Musk owns the site, its architecture will favor his political allies. If you see posting to X as a fight, then know it is not a fair one. For example: In October, Musk shared a fake screenshot of an Atlantic article, manipulated to show a fake headline—his post, which he never deleted, garnered more than 18 million views. The Atlantic’s X post debunking Musk’s claim received just 28,000 views. Musk is unfathomably rich. He’s used that money to purchase a platform, take it private, and effectively turn it into a megaphone for the world’s loudest racists. Now he’s attempting to use it to elect a corrupt, election-denying felon to the presidency.

To stay on X is not an explicit endorsement of this behavior, but it does help enable it. I’m not at all suggesting—as Musk has previously alleged—that the site be shut down or that Musk should be silenced. But there’s no need to stick around and listen. Why allow Musk to appear even slightly more credible by lending our names, our brands, and our movements to a platform that makes the world more dangerous for real people? To my dismay, I’ve hid from these questions for too long. Now that I’ve confronted them, I have no good answers.

After the 2016 elections, critics blamed Facebook for undermining American democracy. They believed that the app’s algorithmic News Feed pushed hyperpartisan content, outright fake news, and Russian-seeded disinformation to huge numbers of people. (The U.S. director of national intelligence agreed, and in January 2017 declassified a report that detailed Russia’s actions.) At first, the company’s executives dismissed these concerns—shortly after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg said it was “pretty crazy” to think that fake news on Facebook had played a role—but they soon grew contrite. “Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it,” Zuckerberg would say 10 months later. Facebook had by then conceded that its own data did “not contradict” the intelligence report. Shortly thereafter, Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of News Feed at the time, told this magazine that the company was launching a number of new initiatives “to stop the spread of misinformation, click-bait and other problematic content on Facebook.” He added: “We’ve learned things since the election, and we take our responsibility to protect the community of people who use Facebook seriously.”

Nowhere was the effort more apparent than in the launch of the company’s “war room” ahead of the 2018 midterms. Here, employees across departments would come together in front of a huge bank of computers to monitor Facebook for misinformation, fake news, threats of violence, and other crises. Numerous reporters were invited in at the time; The Verge, Wired, and The New York Times were among the outlets that ran access-driven stories about the effort. But the war room looked, to some, less like a solution and more like a mollifying stunt—a show put on for the press. And by 2020, with the rise of QAnon conspiracy theories and “Stop the Steal” groups, things did not seem generally better on Facebook.

[Read: What Facebook did to American democracy]

What is happening on Facebook now? On the eve of another chaotic election, journalists have found that highly deceptive political advertisements still run amok there, as do election-fraud conspiracy theories. The Times reported in September that the company, now called Meta, had fewer full-time employees working on election integrity and that Zuckerberg was no longer having weekly meetings with the lieutenants in charge of them. The paper also reported that Meta had replaced the war room with a less sharply defined “election operations center.”

When I reached out to Meta to ask about its plans, the company did not give many specific details. But Corey Chambliss, a Meta spokesperson focused on election preparedness, told me that the war room definitely still exists and that “election operations center” is just another of its names. He proved this with a video clip showing B-roll footage of a few dozen employees working in a conference room on Super Tuesday. The video had been shot in Meta’s Washington, D.C., office, but Chambliss impressed upon me that it could really be anywhere: The war room moves and exists in multiple places. “Wouldn’t want to over-emphasize the physical space as it’s sort of immaterial,” he wrote in an email.

It is clear that Meta wants to keep its name out of this election however much that is possible. It may marshal its considerable resources and massive content-moderation apparatus to enforce its policies against election interference, and it may “break the glass,” as it did in 2021, to take additional action if something as dramatic as January 6 happens again. At the same time, it won’t draw a lot of attention to those efforts or be very specific about them. Recent conversations I’ve had with a former policy lead at the company and academics who have worked with and studied Facebook, as well as Chambliss, made it clear that as a matter of policy, the company has done whatever it can to fly under the radar this election season—including Zuckerberg’s declining to endorse a candidate, as he has in previous presidential elections. When it comes to politics, Meta and Zuckerberg have decided that there is no winning. At this pivotal moment, it is simply doing less.

Meta’s war room may be real, but it is also just a symbol—its meaning has been haggled over for six years now, and its name doesn’t really matter. “People got very obsessed with the naming of this room,” Katie Harbath, a former public-policy director at Facebook who left the company in March 2021, told me. She disagreed with the idea that the room was ever a publicity stunt. “I spent a lot of time in that very smelly, windowless room,” she said. I wondered whether the war room—ambiguous in terms of both its accomplishments and its very existence—was the perfect way to understand the company’s approach to election chaos. I posed to Harbath that the conversation around the war room was really about the anxiety of not knowing what, precisely, Meta is doing behind closed doors to meet the challenges of the moment.

She agreed that part of the reason the room was created was to help people imagine content moderation. Its primary purpose was practical and logistical, she said, but it was “a way to give a visual representation of what the work looks like too.” That’s why, this year, the situation is so muddy. Meta doesn’t want you to think there is no war room, but it isn’t drawing attention to the war room. There was no press junket; there were no tours. There is no longer even a visual of the war room as a specific room in one place.

This is emblematic of Meta’s in-between approach this year. Meta has explicit rules against election misinformation on its platforms; these include a policy against content that attempts to deceive people about where and how to vote. The rules do not, as written, include false claims about election results (although such claims are prohibited in paid ads). Posts about the Big Lie—the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—were initially moderated with fact-checking labels, but these were scaled back dramatically before the 2022 midterms, purportedly because users disliked them. The company also made a significant policy update this year to clarify that it would require labels on AI-generated content (a change made after its Oversight Board criticized its previous manipulated-media policy as “incoherent”). But tons of unlabeled generative-AI slop still flows without consequence on Facebook.

[Read: “History will not judge us kindly”]

In recent years, Meta has also attempted to de-prioritize political content of all kinds in its various feeds. “As we’ve said for years, people have told us they want to see less politics overall while still being able to engage with political content on our platforms if they want,” Chambliss told me. “That’s exactly what we’ve been doing.” When I emailed to ask questions about the company’s election plans, Chambliss initially responded by linking me to a short blog post that Meta put out 11 months ago, and attaching a broadly circulated fact sheet, which included such vague figures as “$20 billion invested in teams and technology in this area since 2016.” This information is next-to-impossible for a member of the public to make sense of—how is anyone supposed to know what $20 billion can buy?

In some respects, Meta’s reticence is just part of a broader cultural shift. Content moderation has become politically charged in recent years. Many high-profile misinformation and disinformation research projects born in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection have shut down or shrunk. (When the Stanford Internet Observatory, an organization that published regular reports on election integrity and misinformation, shut down, right-wing bloggers celebrated the end of its “reign of censorship.”) The Biden administration experimented in 2022 with creating a Disinformation Governance Board, but quickly abandoned the plan after it drew a firestorm from the right—whose pundits and influencers portrayed the proposal as one for a totalitarian “Ministry of Truth.” The academic who had been tasked with leading it was targeted so intensely that she resigned.

“Meta has definitely been quieter,” Harbath said. “They’re not sticking their heads out there with public announcements.” This is partly because Zuckerberg has become personally exasperated with politics, she speculated. She added that it is also the result of the response the company got in 2020—accusations from Democrats of doing too little, accusations from Republicans of doing far too much. The far right was, for a while, fixated on the idea that Zuckerberg had personally rigged the presidential election in favor of Joe Biden and that he frequently bowed to Orwellian pressure from the Biden administration afterward. In recent months, Zuckerberg has been oddly conciliatory about this position; in August, he wrote what amounted to an apology letter to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, saying that Meta had overdone it with its efforts to curtail COVID-19 misinformation and that it had erred by intervening to minimize the spread of the salacious news story about Hunter Biden and his misplaced laptop.  

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, used to donate large sums of money to nonpartisan election infrastructure through their philanthropic foundation. They haven’t done so this election cycle, seeking to avoid a repeat of the controversy ginned up by Republicans the last time. This had not been enough to satisfy Trump, though, and he recently threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison for the rest of his life if he makes any political missteps—which may, of course, be one of the factors Zuckerberg is considering in choosing to stay silent.

Other circumstances have changed dramatically since 2020, too. Just before that election, the sitting president was pushing conspiracy theories about the election, about various groups of his own constituents, and about a pandemic that had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. He was still using Facebook, as were the adherents of QAnon, the violent conspiracy theory that positioned him as a redeeming godlike figure. After the 2020 election, Meta said publicly that Facebook would no longer recommend political or civic groups for users to join—clearly in response to the criticism that the site’s own recommendations guided people into “Stop the Steal” groups. And though Facebook banned Trump himself for using the platform to incite violence on January 6, the platform reinstated his account once it became clear that he would again be running for president

This election won’t be like the previous one. QAnon simply isn’t as present in the general culture, in part because of actions that Meta and other platforms took in 2020 and 2021. More will happen on other platforms this year, in more private spaces, such as Telegram groups. And this year’s “Stop the Steal” movement will likely need less help from Facebook to build momentum: YouTube and Trump’s own social platform, Truth Social, are highly effective for this purpose. Election denial has also been galvanized from the top by right-wing influencers and media personalities including Elon Musk, who has turned X into the perfect platform for spreading conspiracy theories about voter fraud. He pushes them himself all the time.

In many ways, understanding Facebook’s relevance is harder than ever. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that 33 percent of U.S. adults say they “regularly” get news from the platform. But Meta has limited access to data for both journalists and academics in the past two years. After the 2020 election, the company partnered with academics for a huge research project to sort out what happened and to examine Facebook’s broader role in American politics. It was cited when Zuckerberg was pressed to answer for Facebook’s role in the organization of the “Stop the Steal” movement and January 6: “We believe that independent researchers and our democratically elected officials are best positioned to complete an objective review of these events,” he said at the time. That project is coming to an end, some of the researchers involved told me, and Chabliss confirmed.

The first big release of research papers produced through the partnership, which gave researchers an unprecedented degree of access to platform data, came last summer. Still more papers will continue to be published as they pass peer review and are accepted to scientific journals—one paper in its final stages will deal with the diffusion of misinformation—but all of these studies were conducted using data from 2020 and 2021. No new data have or will be provided to these researchers.

When I asked Chambliss about the end of the partnership, he emphasized that no other platform had bothered to do as robust of a research project. However, he wouldn’t say exactly why it was coming to an end. “It’s a little frustrating that such a massive and unprecedented undertaking that literally no other platform has done is put to us as a question of ‘why not repeat this?’ vs asking peer companies why they haven't come close to making similar commitments for past or current elections,” he wrote in an email.

The company also shut down the data-analysis tool CrowdTangle—used widely by researchers and by journalists—earlier this year. It touts new tools that have been made available to researchers, but academics scoff at the claim that they approximate anything like real access to live and robust information. Without Meta’s cooperation, it becomes much harder for academics to effectively monitor what happens on its platforms.

I recently spoke with Kathleen Carley, a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, about research she conducted from 2020 to 2022 on the rise of “pink slime,” a type of mass-produced misinformation designed to look like the product of local newspapers and to be shared on social media. Repeating that type of study for the 2024 election would cost half a million dollars, she estimated, because researchers now have to pay if they want broad data access. From her observations and the more targeted, “surgical” data pulls that her team has been able to do this year, pink-slime sites are far more concentrated in swing states than they had been previously, while conspiracy theories were spreading just as easily as ever. But these are observations; they’re not a real monitoring effort, which would be too costly.

“Monitoring implies that we’re doing consistent data crawls and have wide-open access to data,” she told me, “which we do not.” This time around, nobody will.

In June, Ivan Raiklin, a retired Green Beret and pro–Donald Trump activist, sat down for a chat with Cliven Bundy, a Nevada cattle rancher who instigated an armed standoff with federal authorities in 2014 over his refusal to pay grazing fees.

In the video—posted on the America Happens Network, which has aired documentaries such as Bundy vs. Deep State and the series Conspiracy Truths—Raiklin explained that tens of thousands of service members had refused to comply with a Defense Department mandate that all personnel receive a vaccine for COVID-19, because they did not want to be “experimented on with an unsafe and ineffective, what I call ‘DNA-mutilation injection.’” He told Bundy that the “illegal” mandate, since rescinded, was to blame for the “total destruction of our constitutional order.”

“There must be consequences,” Raiklin said, for the “unlawful, immoral, unethical, illegal” vaccination program, which he also asserted, with no evidence, “ended up killing lots of people.” In fact, tens of thousands of service members did refuse the vaccine, and about 8,000 were discharged for failing to comply with the policy. But Raiklin speculated that as many as 1 million more still in uniform might “want to participate in retribution” against Pentagon leadership. (Depending on where in the world they serve, military personnel are required to receive about a dozen other vaccinations, including for polio, influenza, and typhoid.)

Retribution is Raiklin’s watchword these days. He calls himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” settling scores from the first term and ready to do the same in a potential second. His battles aren’t only with military leaders. After Trump lost the presidency in 2020, Raiklin suggested that Vice President Mike Pence could reject electors from the states that Joe Biden had won, on the grounds that they might be fraudulent. Those ideas were later taken up by John Eastman, a lawyer who has been indicted in Arizona for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results there. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Raiklin may be one of the intellectual founders of Trump’s election denialism.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]

More recently, Raiklin, who left the Army Reserve in 2022 at the rank of lieutenant colonel, according to an Army spokesperson, has promoted the potentially illegal idea that state legislatures could withhold their electors in the event that Trump loses. He has shown up in swing states, including North Carolina, where he pushed for lawmakers to award the electors to Trump ahead of time, on the theory that Hurricane Helene had disrupted the casting of ballots in the state.

Raiklin’s ideas for ensuring a Trump victory dovetail with the plans he has hinted at for exacting retributive justice on government officials. In his conversation with Bundy, Raiklin said that he would like to “coordinate” with those members of the armed forces supposedly still aggrieved over mandatory vaccinations, “to channel those skills, training, passion, in a positive way, to kind of autocorrect the lawlessness and to create consequences for those who created that lawlessness.”

Raiklin did not explicitly call for violence, even though he praised Bundy as “quite the legend” for his aggressive opposition to federal authority. Rather, he said he wanted “appropriate lawful justice”—but archly suggested that this should come from outside the court system. Raiklin chooses his words carefully, even when they are freighted with menace. Bundy asked how the ex-soldier would treat the federal prosecutors in his own case, and Raiklin replied calmly, “I would conduct the most peaceful and patriotic legal and moral and ethical actions that they’ve ever experienced in their life.”

A New York native with a degree from the Touro Law Center, in Central Islip, Raiklin describes himself as a constitutional lawyer. He served as an intelligence officer in the National Guard in several states as well as in the regular Army, deploying to Jordan and Afghanistan. Among his numerous commendations and awards is the Bronze Star Medal, given for meritorious service or acts of valor in a combat zone.  

He has suggested that military personnel could be “deputized by sheriffs,” as he told Bundy in their conversation. This idea is rooted in the fringe theory that local sheriffs possess law-enforcement authority superseding that of any elected official or officer, at any level of government. Proponents of the so-called constitutional sheriffs’ movement urged sheriffs to investigate disproven claims of election fraud in 2020 and to get involved this year in election administration.

Bundy seemed a bit daunted by the scale of resistance that Raiklin described to him. The federal bureaucracy is “so broad,” he said, that it’s practically immovable. Raiklin reassured him: “That’s where people like me come into play, that know the system very well and in detail, to create priorities. You start with the top, and you work your way through the system.”   

To guide that work, Raiklin has created a “deep-state target list,” with the names of more than 300 current and former government officials, members of Congress, journalists, and others who he thinks deserve some of that “lawful justice.” The names of some of their family members are also included.

The list, which is helpfully color-coded, reads like a greatest hits of all the supposedly corrupt plotters who Trump and his supporters allege have targeted them. Among others, it includes FBI officials who worked on the investigation into potential links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia; lawmakers and congressional staff who managed both Trump impeachments; members of the Capitol Police who defended Congress from pro-Trump rioters on January 6, 2021; witnesses who later testified to Congress about the attack; and the senior public-health officials who led the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. As if to demonstrate that even the closest of Trump’s allies can still be in league with the forces of government treachery, the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped speed development of the COVID vaccine as a member of Operation Warp Speed, also made Raiklin’s list.

Several former intelligence officials Raiklin has singled out told me they are well acquainted with his threats. They presume that if Trump is reelected, the Justice Department, the IRS, and other federal agencies will conduct capricious audits and frivolous investigations, all designed, if not to put them in prison, then to spend large sums of money on legal fees. A few told me they worried that Raiklin would publish their addresses or details about their families. They were less concerned about him showing up at their home than about some unhinged deep-state hunter he might inspire. In interviews with right-wing podcasters, Raiklin has said he would conduct “livestreamed swatting raids” against his targets. Swatting is the illegal practice of falsely reporting an emergency in order to summon armed law enforcement to someone’s home.

Raiklin’s future in a Trump administration is uncertain. But he is close to major figures in Trump’s orbit, particularly Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who was indicted for lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned him in November 2020.

Raikiln is also a board member of America’s Future, a nonprofit organization that has pursued conservative causes for decades, of which Flynn is the chair. Other board members have amplified the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory—promoted by the QAnon movement, of which Flynn is an ally—that some Democratic politicians kidnap, torture, and eat children.

Like Raiklin, Flynn has long railed against suspected deep-state actors, whom he has accused of torpedoing his career in intelligence. Flynn was regarded as a brilliant tactical intelligence officer when he served in Afghanistan and Iraq. But after he became the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, senior intelligence officials worried that his erratic management style and conspiratorial attitudes made him unfit for the job. Top intelligence officials pushed Flynn out in 2014, after an unhappy and sometimes-tumultuous two-year tenure. James Clapper, who was the director of national intelligence at the time, is on Raiklin’s list.

A few years later, Trump named Flynn to be his national security adviser, a position he held for just 24 days. Flynn resigned in February 2017, following revelations that he’d had contact with Russia’s ambassador to the United States and given misleading statements to senior administration officials.

A Trump-campaign official told me that Raiklin has “no role or affiliation with the campaign.” Raiklin seems to like to suggest a relationship by promoting his physical proximity to Trump. In a post on X, he shared a photo of himself standing feet from Trump while he spoke from the lectern at an unidentified rally. Also standing nearby was Kash Patel, a fierce Trump loyalist said to be on a shortlist for a senior national-security position in a second Trump administration, possibly director of the CIA.

[From the October 2024 issue: The man who will do anything for Trump]

Raiklin is not shy about his aspirations. I sent him an email, requesting an interview about his deep-state list. Rather than reply, he posted a screenshot of my message on X and said he would “much rather discuss” the subject, as well as the direct appointment of electors through state legislatures, “with Americans operating in good faith.” He suggested a number of conservative podcasters he thought fit the bill.

Raiklin invited me to post my questions on X, “in the interest of public transparency and exposure and [to] show the world you are operating in good faith.” So I did.  

“What is the purpose of this list?” I asked. “Why did you select these people? Do you intend to do anything to the people on this list?”

Raiklin replied with links to videos of interviews he had already done with conservative media figures, including the former television star Roseanne Barr. On her show, Raiklin explained that although the deep state went by many other names—“permanent Washington,” “the Uniparty,” “the duopoly”—“I just simply call them war-criminal scum.”

“I happen to be the guy that said, You know what? I’ve had enough,” he said. “Let me expose them by name, date, place, transgression, category. And let’s start educating the country on who they are, so that they’re not able to walk anywhere, whether it’s in the digital space or physical space, without them feeling the, let’s just say, wrath of their neighbors, friends, relatives, family.”

Barr then sang to Raiklin lyrics from “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” to his obvious delight.

It’s hard to know whether Raiklin is a true believer—and potentially dangerous—or just a profiteering troll. His unwillingness to respond to direct questions from a journalist suggests the latter.

After I pressed Raiklin to answer me, rather than post interviews he’d done with friendly hosts inclined to agree with him, he invited me to direct further questions through Minnect, an app that lets you solicit advice from self-professed experts. According to his Minnect profile, Raiklin’s current rate for answering a question via text is $50. For $100, he’ll provide a recorded video response. A video call, “for the most personalized advice,” will run you $20 a minute, with a 15-minute minimum.

“Are you asking me to book you for a fee?” I wrote in his X thread. I wanted to be sure I correctly understood Raiklin’s proposal. He replied, “And 50% of the revenue created from the article you write. Send the contract to [his email] for my team to review.”

I declined.

A few days later, he was back to campaign work, exhorting state officials to intervene in the presidential election.

“Republican State Legislatures just need to hand their States’ electors to Trump, just like the Democrat elites handed the primary ‘win’ to Kamala Harris,” he wrote Wednesday on X, adding, “276 electors on Nov 5 ... CheckMate! Then we can Castrate the Deep State and Crush the Commies immediately on January 20, 2025.”