The Free Press
One thing The Free Press has always been against is bullies.
When we began, the most powerful bullies were on the left. They came after some of the most courageous, independent minds in America—people like Abigail Shrier and Amy Chua, who were demonized for simply describing the world as they see it—as well as doctors who were just trying to do their jobs, and authors who happened to be Jewish.
But bullying is not an inherently left-wing activity. It’s a human one. There will always be bullies, on both sides of the political fence, because when people gain power, they find themselves tempted to use it to control and undermine and attack anything they don’t like. Especially if they’re feeling vengeful.
So one of the reasons we were so critical of the far-left mob was that we knew eventually it would empower a far-right one. That moment has now come, and as our reporter River Page argues in the important essay below, it’s most obvious on the internet. Twitter used to be a place where the far-left would viciously attack someone for saying sex is real; it has become a platform where far-right trolls can say someone is “not an Anglo Saxon and therefore should be ignored.”
Or, as Bari put it in her speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship on Monday, “just as the left defaced and desecrated statues of Churchill, the vandals on the right desecrate his name and his memory.” (Read the full speech here.)
At The Free Press, our belief is simple: America is no place for mob rule. And when we see it, we won’t just point it out. We’ll resist it. —The Editors
Yesterday morning, like I do every morning, I woke up and immediately opened Twitter (a.k.a. X), where the first thing I saw was Elon Musk reacting positively to a post alleging that actor Tom Hanks is a pedophile. Then I saw that Lord Miles—a conservative travel influencer best known for visiting Afghanistan during the Taliban’s reconquista in 2021—has come to believe that another right-wing influencer, this one anonymous, is “not an Anglo Saxon and therefore should be ignored.” When I scrolled on, I saw someone telling the self-described misogynist and accused human trafficker Andrew Tate, whose father was black, that he’s a “mongrel half breed.” Then, my coffee was done!
For those of you who are offline, it is important you understand how bad things have gotten on X. Since Trump’s win in November, the extreme right has completely taken over the platform, and every day they’re getting high on their own supply, expressing opinions that the average American, including Trump voters, would find alienating, insane, or offensive.
Antisemitism is rampant on the platform—and I don’t just mean indelicate criticisms of Israel from the left. I mean posts from right-wing accounts, many of them with hundreds of thousands of followers, promoting Holocaust denial, greedy merchant memes, and the idea that Jews are pushing interracial marriage to destroy the white race.
Speaking of which, tirades against interracial marriage—an issue 94 percent of Americans support—have become very common on X. Take this recent post, from a right-wing account with over 100K followers, which features a sad-looking biracial teenager with the caption, “Was it worth it, Mom?” The post got 30K likes and was seen by two million people. (The average Fox News broadcast gets fewer than 500,000 views.) The top comment, with over 1,700 likes, describes biracial children as a failed Jewish science experiment.
Maybe you think none of this matters. For a decade, people have often said that Twitter is not real life, because only one in five Americans use it. But it didn’t matter who wasn’t on Twitter, it mattered who was: writers, academics, politicians, and large swaths of the professional managerial class. Twitter is where the elite manufacture opinions and tastes that regular people—the normies—will later encounter through movies, books, street riots, newscasts, corporate HR meetings, and political campaigns. For years it was dominated by the left, which claimed to have no real power outside of Twitter—the common refrain being real communism has never been tried—because not every part of its agenda was being implemented in every part of the real world, and also capitalism still exists. But they had a cultural hegemony that the right always dreamed of usurping.
And with Musk’s takeover and renaming of the site in October 2022, they finally seized the means of production.
Just as left-wing commenters did, many right-wing commenters on X protest that they don’t actually have any power over institutions outside of Twitter.
But these days, the right controls the government. And Twitter isn’t just real life, it’s a de facto extension of the state—because the man who owns it is effectively running the U.S. government.
And if you want proof that the nasty opinions that are tolerated on X are also increasingly tolerated in real life, consider this: Musk—with explicit support from the vice president—recently rehired a staffer who’d resigned after a Wall Street Journal reporter resurfaced tweets where he’d said, “You couldn’t pay me to date outside my race.” The staffer, Marko Elez, had also posted “Normalize Indian hate,” and well, he got his wish. Hate against Indian people is normalized on X now, as is hate against gays, women, blacks, Muslims, Jews, and practically any other conceivable minority.
Like the left, the right seems to think America is an irreparably racist country. It isn’t. The right’s increasingly extreme rhetoric is eventually going to freak the hell out of ordinary people, just as the left’s crazy ideas did. Then what happens? A backlash. I’ve seen how this process plays out. I witnessed the rise of left-wing extremism on Twitter, and the repression of right-wing views. It got to the point when leftists had no one to fight with but each other, which meant that insane positions had to be staked out at every point in order to identify enemies within the ranks.
In 2016, these dynamics were weaponized against my preferred presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, who had committed the unspeakable crime of running a campaign focused on class issues, not the culture war; he railed against corporate oligarchy, promising universal healthcare, college education, and a $15 hourly minimum wage. That election cycle, he was attacked for describing open borders as an anti-worker “Koch brothers proposal,” which it is. A Black Lives Matter activist wrested a microphone away from Sanders onstage in Seattle, called the crowd racist for booing her, and then demanded they hold Bernie “accountable.” For what, it wasn’t clear: Sanders has spent his life campaigning for racial equality, something he was arrested for in 1963. Also, his supporters were widely slandered as misogynistic “Bernie Bros,” including by Lolita Express frequent flyer Bill Clinton, because Sanders had the audacity to run against a woman.
Yes, I’m still angry about it.
But back then, the left’s cultural dominance hadn’t quite been solidified. I still didn’t know how terrible things would get. During the first Trump administration, it became readily apparent. Goofy terms such as nonbinary, which I had only seen online, began to creep into mainstream media, corporate HR policy, and even my own life. Whenever I observed, as I did several times, that virtually all of the “nonbinary people” I’d met were more or less conventional-looking heterosexual women with a particular type of politics, I was attacked on X—and on one occasion yelled at in real life. Apparently, it was transphobic of me to police how nonbinary people “present their gender,” or so I was told. This was nearly half a decade ago, and I’ve nuked my Twitter account several times since—so luckily, most of the abuse is lost to internet history.
I was also attacked for pointing out that “defunding the police” would mean depriving the working class of safety that the bourgeoisie can afford to pay for privately. Commenters told me I wanted black people to die. And when I described unfettered immigration as “class warfare”—the position of nearly every trade union in this country for the past 200 years—I was called a white supremacist. When I said child transitions are not only harmful, but also deeply alienating to the sensibilities of normal people, I was sent death threats.
I could go on.
At every turn, I noted that the left’s extreme cultural politics were alienating and sometimes even materially harmful to the working class. In the laboratory of Twitter, the Frankenstein-left were building a monster—a conglomeration of niche, off-putting, impossible to defend political positions sewn together and stomping about—to the obvious horror of normie villagers. Online, I was told to shut up—so eventually, I did. I stopped calling myself a leftist, and eventually, I even stopped correcting the people who assumed I’m a conservative. (I’m not.) Then, on Election Day 2024, the normie villagers took out their torches and chased the left-wing monster out of town.
They’ll do the same to the monster the online right is building. We’ve gotten to the point where the right-wing hegemony on X is just as—if not more—entrenched than the left’s was. Millions of people who find the atmosphere heinous have fled to alternative platforms like Bluesky. With no more libs to own, people on the online right are going after each other, staking out increasingly extreme positions that reify their status as purists within the movement, even if it means attacking their allies.
When I pointed this out on Twitter last week, a lot of people called me a faggot. Be that as it may, I’m a faggot who knows to get out of the way when a pendulum is about to swing right into him. So, a final word to my conservative friends: The pendulum is going at breakneck speed. It will fly back, and when it does—it’ll hit you harder than you think.
The story of the JFK conspiracy theory isn’t just about a few hucksters red-pilling traumatized boomers. No. It’s also about how the government squandered its most precious asset: the trust of the American people. This week on Breaking History, Eli Lake examines the chain of events that led Donald Trump to declassify the remaining files on JFK’s assassination.