Elon Musk’s amplification of QAnon propaganda is a new and worrying low

X owner Elon Musk spends a lot of time posting far-right talking points and misinformation on his social media platform. But on the eve of Election Day, just before NBC News predicted Donald Trump's re-election, Musk released a pro-Trump video that was arguably more disturbing than pretty much anything he had shared before. The video contains messages related to QAnon, one of the most damaging and mind-numbing conspiracy theories circulating among MAGA believers. And once again you have to ask yourself how we ended up in a situation where a man with so much power believes such backwards things.

The video re-released by Musk is a manic mix of footage from Donald Trump's campaign, military aircraft, domestic family life scenes from the mid-20th century and various images symbolizing violent strength and a return to the past. The video features clips of the former president promising revenge and eternal victory: “If you do something bad to us, we will do things to you that have never been done before,” Trump warns in one clip. “2024 is our last fight,” he says in another. At one point in the video where Trump says, “The future belongs to patriots,” the word “PATRIQTS” flashes across the screen. Then all letters except Q disappear. This is a clear reference to QAnon.

QAnon is a web of outlandish pro-Trump conspiracy theories that claim that Democrats and Hollywood run Satan-worshipping pedophile sex trafficking rings and that Trump's political rise is part of a covert mission to track them down and execute many of them. Among other things, many who subscribe to QAnon's tenets believe that members of this secret cabal “kill and eat their victims to obtain a life-extending chemical called adrenochrome,” according to the New York Times. A branch of the QAnon movement believed that John F. Kennedy Jr. did not die in a plane crash in 1999 and would appear at a rally in Dallas in 2021.

Musk's decision to share the video isn't definitive proof that he subscribes to the QAnon mindset, but it at least shows that he's comfortable spreading it. And it is conceivable that he will get involved. Musk's posts demonstrate total immersion in the MAGA mindset; He constantly spreads evidence-free conspiracy theories about voter fraud and absurd racist theories about Democrats importing migrants to wrest control of the country from Republicans. He has supported white supremacist conspiracy theories that Jewish communities foment “anti-white hatred.” (He later apologized.) Supporting QAnon thinking is another rung on that ladder.

Musk's spread of QAnon news marks his entry into a fundamentally more troubling brand of political activism. Not only do QAnon proponents believe things for which there is no evidence, but they also believe things that are so far from possible truth that their overall understanding of reality is questionable. If Musk were your average person, this would be a sad story, but it wouldn't be a big deal for the rest of us. But he runs several companies that have enormous influence on American life and international affairs. It should worry us that a man who controls satellites capable of turning the tide of major wars is willing to sign on to the idea that Trump is a messianic warrior against the deep state. It should worry us that a man who sells more electric vehicles in America than every other automaker combined is OK, thereby reinforcing the worldview that Hillary Clinton is a Satanist who should be executed.

Most pressing is how a possible connection with QAnon might affect the way Musk exercises his power as the owner of Those Who Don't Get It – are fit to oversee one of the most important areas of civil society on the Internet?

And if Musk really believes in QAnon, if he really believes Trump is caught up in a fight against an evil cultthen it's not hard to imagine him further abandoning his already inconsistent and arbitrary commitment to “free speech” and fairness principles in order to spread even more nonsense and more propagandistic content in the future to support the far right. The arguments against billionaire ownership of our most important information infrastructure grow stronger by the day.