QAnon emerged over five years ago now, but the Left and their allies in the mainstream media keep trying to make them relevant again. The New York Times did it recently with regards to the very appropriate outrage over Balenciaga's ad campaign, and now The Washington Post is doing so when it comes to Elon Musk.
The piece in question was published on Wednesday and comes from Drew Harwell, who wastes no time in letting you know how terrible Musk supposedly is:
Twitter owner Elon Musk’s boosting of far-right memes and grievances has injected new energy into the jumbled set of conspiracy theories known as QAnon, a fringe movement that Twitter and other social networks once banned as too extreme.
The billionaire has spread bogus theories about the violent attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband to his 120 million followers, and he called for the criminal prosecution of infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci. He has thrown around baseless accusations about adults sexualizing children, helping stir up an angry online mob against Yoel Roth, a former Twitter safety executive Musk praised in October for his “high integrity.”
There's no mention of how Musk deleted the tweet in question about Paul Pelosi, or about how his claims actually have merit to them. It's also worth emphasizing that The Washington Post can hardly be taken seriously for anything they have to write about the Twitter files, which Yoel Roth was implicated in when it comes to blacklisting and banning conservative accounts on the platform. As Leah highlighted earlier, independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss were referred to as "conservative journalists" for their coverage of the Twitter files.
With this piece, Harwell even ties in the Twitter files to QAnon. "QAnon proponents have widely celebrated Musk’s impact at Twitter, including the 'Twitter Files' cache showing how company officials made content moderation decisions and Musk’s sudden dissolution on Monday of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, which civil rights experts had contributed to since 2016," he writes.
To Harwell's credit, he does actually discuss QAnon, unlike the multiple authors of The New York Times piece mentioned above, who mentioned it once other than in the headline and sub-headline of their particularly lengthy piece. That doesn't make it any better, though. It's almost even more ridiculous.
Those the Left decides to attack are held to higher standards, and so Musk is therefore responsible for how QAnon supporters interpret his every tweet:
And on Tuesday, he tweeted a message with an emoji that many people interpreted as saying “follow the white rabbit,” possibly harking back to “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Matrix.” But many QAnon believers saw the rabbit as a wink to one of their foundational icons, a secret indicator shared in one of QAnon’s earliest online prophesies, known as “drops.”
Musk mocked the suggestion that the tweet could be interpreted negatively but offered no clarification. Among QAnon promoters, though, the message was clear: Musk was speaking to them.
People who incite violence against Supreme Court justices are apparently another story.
For how much QAnon is described as "a fringe movement" that is "too extreme," Harwell sure spends a lot of time highlighting what their followers are talking about.
There are concessions about Musk's views, but they're buried in the piece, and it adds insult to injury when it comes to the larger point of tying Musk in with QAnon:
Musk has never explicitly supported QAnon, and some of his closest allies say they doubt he believes some of the wilder things he says online. One person in Musk’s inner circle, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Musk’s views, said he uses the claims merely to win the internet’s most prized currency: attention. “He wants to muck it up,” the person said.
...
Musk does not perfectly fit the QAnon mold. He tweeted Tuesday that he is “generally pro-FBI,” and he said last month he would not reinstate the Twitter account of Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist ordered to pay more than $1 billion in damages to the families of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which Jones had called a hoax.
Even Musk's own words are not good enough for Harwell, as he doubles down on insisting how tied in with "far-right causes" Musk is. That he supposedly has something in common with QAnon is also cause for a freak-out:
Musk, who has said he is “neither conventionally right nor left,” has chatted and joked on Twitter with prominent right-wing influencers and commentators, sometimes expressing outrage about how they have been treated by the “woke mob.” Musk has said the “woke mind virus” — a vague term generally referring to liberal advocacy, social justice and political correctness — is “pushing civilization towards suicide” so that “humanity will never [reach] Mars.”
He has also echoed far-right causes, including saying Fauci should face criminal punishment for lying to Congress and funding infectious-disease research “that killed millions of people.” Musk’s claims lack real evidence, and the White House has said Musk’s attacks are “divorced from reality.” (“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” Musk tweeted Sunday in a jab at transgender identity, which he has also criticized.)
...
But like Q, he has often framed current events as titanic spectacles of apocalyptic grandeur. Musk on Monday agreed that the world is facing a “mass awakening event or total collapse of society,” and he tweeted that buying Twitter is a way to combat the “woke mind virus,” which must be “defeated or nothing else matters.”
As Kurt aptly pointed out in a column from Wednesday, Musk isn't even a conservative, and we need to stop depending on and relying on these non-conservatives so much.
Further, as one can see from not just many of Musk's tweets, but also his response to ridiculous outlets and pieces such as this one, it appears he revels in being something of a troll himself.
"Asked for his thoughts about QAnon, Musk responded in an email: 'lol,'" Harwell mentioned in his piece.
As Bonchie highlighted at our sister site of RedState, that's been a particularly favorable and memorable part of the article.
"Asked for his thoughts about QAnon, Musk responded in an email: 'lol'" pic.twitter.com/ByYVEc2P8n
— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) December 15, 2022
Making the piece and its claims even more ridiculous is that it was tweeted by Glenn Kessler, who serves as the outlet's fact-checker. What attention the tweet did get was to mock Kessler, especially and including for his role.
QAnon, adrift after Trump’s defeat, finds new life in Elon Musk’s Twitter https://t.co/a4ToPcjcDA
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) December 15, 2022
In case you need any more proof as to how the outlet and its writers think about Musk and his handling of Twitter, go check out Taylor Lorenz and her tweets and articles for the outlet.