Speaker 1: You don't have to have his website and a link that people have to click on, you can just say stuff and you could get attention. You don't need to be Breitbart to do that anymore.

Brooke Gladstone: Does the rise of X, signal the fall traditional right-wing outlets? From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, in Russia, a funeral and election, and a journalist in prison.

Speaker 2: It's hard to see your friend and colleague on the front page of a magazine. I think he just wants to be writing the stories. I think he wants to be in Russia reporting about this repression.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, the importance of nuance to distinguish between terms like anti-colonial, decolonization.

Speaker 3: There's a lot of these words flying around. There are many people who are not using them in a way that furthered the debate or even informed people.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

Joe Biden: My fellow Americans, [applause] the issue facing our nation isn't how old we are, it's how old are our ideas.

Micah Loewinger: An energized Joe Biden speaking at the State of Union on Thursday.

Joe Biden: You can't lead America with ancient ideas.

Speaker 4: Joe Biden delivered what has been described in the press so far as feisty, fiery, heated.

Speaker 5: You can tell how well he did by how annoyed Republicans are this morning.

Sean Hannity: A very different Joe Biden. I might call him, jacked-up Joe.

Micah Loewinger: Sean Hannity of Fox News, who until now has preferred the sleepy Joe epithet, a coinage from Donald Trump or, 'my predecessor', as Biden called him 13 times on Thursday. Now we've entered a new phase of the race with Super Tuesday behind us and Nikki Haley out, Trump can finally start raising money like the GOP nominee. Just kidding. He's been at it for months.

Speaker 6: Donald Trump's campaign is parlaying an embarrassing precedent into much-needed cash. The former president surrendered yesterday at Atlanta jail. Here is the mug shot.

Speaker 7: Trump's face is already making its way onto T-shirts and coffee mugs.

Speaker 8: Donald Trump launching his own limited edition, Trump digital trading cards.

Speaker 5: His new Trump-branded sneakers. They are painted gold. They are named "Never Surrender high-Tops". I can't make this up guys, and they sell for just under $400.

Micah Loewinger: Despite all his merch sales and donations, Trump's campaign fundraising is lagging behind Team Biden. He's also on the hook for $83 million for defaming E. Jean Carroll and $355 million for fraudulent business practices in New York. Adding interest and other penalties, NPR estimated he owes $600 million, enter the world's second-richest man.

Speaker 9: Check out this headline from the New York Times. Trump's seeking cash infusion meets with Elon Musk.

Speaker 10: Elon Musk is in a unique position to come close to erasing that deficit almost single-handedly.

Micah Loewinger: Writing in The Washington Post this week, columnist Philip Bump argued that "it's not money that Elon Musk is contributing to Donald Trump. These two kindred spirits have other reasons for teaming up".

Philip Bump: I think it's important to recognize that they are reflections of each other. That Donald Trump was a business person who increasingly embraced right-wing politics and then moved into the political realm. Elon Musk was a business person and has increasingly embraced even further right-wing rhetoric and is becoming more of a political actor in part through his purchase of Twitter, which is now X. It is that similarity in both trajectory and landing points that made it natural that the two of them would at some point in time put their heads together.

Micah Loewinger: Musk tweeted that he was "not donating money to either candidate for US President". Musk isn't going to give Trump money, right?

Philip Bump: Well, there's a lot of wiggle room in not contributing to candidates. He could potentially donate to a Super PAC. He could start his own super PAC, which is supporting Trump. He could do things like work out some way of allowing Trump to advertise on his platform relatively inexpensively. There are lots of ways in which he can provide economic value to Trump.

Micah Loewinger: Why would Elon Musk help Donald Trump financially?

Philip Bump: Well, that's the central question. Elon Musk views himself as sitting above the intellectual fray, that he understands the world in a way that others don't. He views himself in the world as the prime mover. If you're Donald Trump, and you're trying to get Elon Musk to give you money, probably the worst way to do it is to try and bring him on board team Trump.

Elon Musk doesn't want to be on anyone else's team. He wants to view Donald Trump as being on his team, make Donald Trump part of his collective. I do think that it's important to note that Elon Musk by virtue of his ownership of X, really does sit on top of a conduit that is really important for Donald Trump and not a financial one, but one that is centered on public attention.

Micah Loewinger: If I were Donald Trump and I were following what has very clearly happened to X since Elon Musk took over, I would say to myself, "Seems like this guy's already pretty aligned with me. Just look at his tweets."

Philip Bump: Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now X, in part as a reaction to this right-wing idea that moderation on Twitter had become something that was an impediment to conservatives. Now, that moderation that Twitter and others like Facebook had implemented, was a response to an increase in abusive and toxic behavior and misinformation that emerged during 2016, in part because of Donald Trump's supporters. That was viewed by the political right as being an imposition on conservative ideology.

Musk reacts to that, buys Twitter/X, and then lifts that moderation. Elon Musk by purchasing this social media platform, has reverted it to this platform that was in 2016, when it was so advantageous to Donald Trump.

Micah Loewinger: Not only has he reverted it, but the guy who owns the platform, who was the most followed person on the platform with over 175 million followers, is himself spreading right-wing conspiracy theories this week in particular about immigration.

Philip Bump: This week, he has embraced this idea that Democrats are trying to bring immigrants into the country so then they can vote. We've seen him do this in the past, using, for example, when he elevated this associated press story, that Biden wanted to create a pathway to citizenship for people who are in the country and who are not yet citizens.

Micah Loewinger: This is an article from 2021.

Philip Bump: That's exactly right. Before he assumed President. The article basically said, "Joe Biden, when he soon becomes president is going to introduce this proposed bill", and so he did. He introduced a proposed bill for a pathway to citizenship and it went into the house and nothing happened, but that's what Musk is using, to say, "Oh, look what Biden's trying to do because they're trying to get all these Democratic voters."

It's just fundamentally dishonest and one wonders whether or not Elon Musk recognizes this as dishonest, but either way, it's advantageous to Donald Trump's position on the way immigration should be addressed.

Micah Loewinger: On Tuesday, he posted that Biden had committed treason. The so-called treasonous act was a new program, which would allow Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. If they had a sponsor in the US, and they passed a background check to work lawfully in the United States for two years. Hardly sneaking people in.

Philip Bump: Yes, exactly. Treason has a very specific definition, which is that you have to aid an enemy of the United States that the United States is at war with. It makes no sense. It's obviously just rhetorical, and it's obviously Elon Musk's knee-jerk reaction to having immigration increase in the United States. Now, there's an irony here, of course, which is that Elon Musk is himself an immigrant to the United States, who has celebrated the fact that he did so by following the standard procedure, but this is exactly that policy.

This is something that was authorized to have people come to the United States as immigrants and be able to be successful here for a period of time. This gets turned around by Elon Musk into something that is evidence of Joe Biden's secret plan to support the United States.

Micah Loewinger: This brand of conspiracy theory is super hot right now in the right-wing media. According to Media Matters, in just the last couple of months, we've heard it on Fox.

Speaker 11: The Democrat Party, the US government gets what they want, which is a new wave of immigrants, perhaps future voters.

Micah Loewinger: On One America News Network.

Speaker 12: If illegal aliens turn residents, turn citizens, turn voters would vote Republican, you and I would not be having this conversation. That is their agenda. They're trying to change the electorate because they cannot win without importing more Democratic voters. That's a whole ballgame.

Micah Loewinger: On Newsmax.

Speaker 13: How many of you feel better, that to start with, Democrats are pushing to let foreign nationals cancel out your vote, but only on local elections?

Micah Loewinger: On right-wing radio.

Speaker 14: This is revolution by illegal immigration Mr. [unintelligible 00:09:10].

Micah Loewinger: It sounds a lot like the great replacement theory.

Philip Bump: Exactly. The great replacement theory puts forward that there is this cabal that is trying to bring new people to the United States to replace those that are here. On the face of it, doesn't really make any sense. Over the course of the past decade or so, we've seen that there is not necessarily a consistent pattern voting for Hispanics living in the United States.

It is not the case that even if you were to have a number of immigrants and create a pathway for them to become citizens to vote, those aren't Democratic voters. That's just simply not how it works. This is not a function of the Biden administration. The path to becoming a citizen takes years and years and years. There's no blanket thing that Joe Biden can do to turn these people into voters. Even if he were to do so, the odds that they vote Democratic are not as high as being presented

Micah Loewinger: After Fox's $787 million settlement with Dominion and the ongoing Smartmatic defamation case, you'd think that right-wing media would be way more careful about these voter fraud claims this time around, and yet these conspiracy theories sure sound like fodder for claims to delegitimize a possible Biden win in November.

Philip Bump: Yes, I think that's true, but I also think that more broadly, this fits into the way in which the political right have tried to delegitimize democratic voting in general, doing things like insisting that the reason young voters like Democrats isn't because they're particularly concerned about climate change, or gun control, or things along those lines, it's because they're being brainwashed by the high school teachers and their professors.

It assumes that if you are someone who supports the Democratic Party, you are necessarily being misled in some way, convinced by Hollywood or by ads, or by CNN or MSNBC, to vote in a particular way that if you weren't simply a rational person, you wouldn't. They have to cheat, they have to try and bring in these non-white always has been the subtext here, people to come into the United States and turn them into Democrats, because of course, once again, they're just going to vote Democratic as Democrats are all sheep. This is just a way of increasing the size of the flock.

Micah Loewinger: In 2020, the right-wing media were obsessed with the vote-by-mail conspiracy theory, that people who wanted to vote from home would be taking advantage of a system to nefariously vote extra times or what have you. This year, it's the undocumented immigrants conspiracy theory that has emerged thus far. There's still plenty of time for other fear-mongering messages and conspiracy theories to rival this one, but could you compare and contrast how this election feels compared to 2020?

Philip Bump: Back in 2020, we heard a lot of similar conspiracy theories about what was going on with crime, that the social justice protests that unfolded over the summer, some of which culminated in acts of vandalism and destruction. Most of them didn't, as we all know by now, that that was span as being this horrible thing that presage what was going to happen under President Biden. Fox News night, after night, after night, would show the same footage of acts of vandalism in New York City.

You'll still here today, Republicans talking about how cities were burned to the ground and destroyed in 2020 and just simply detached from reality, but I think that's the role that immigration is going to play this time. The migrant crime wave. This is already something that Donald Trump and Fox News have picked up. This idea of migrant crime as being something that needs to be tracked independently.

Micah Loewinger: We started the conversation talking about Elon Musk and his growing coalition with MAGA activists, the MAGA leader Donald Trump himself, and the movement at writ large. This transformation of X/Twitter comes at a time when, interestingly right-wing media seem to be really struggling.

New data released last month from the writing using traffic data from Comscore, showed that, for the top right-wing sites, only Newsmax has gained traffic since 2020, and just about everyone else has lost a lot of traffic. Fox is down 24%. The Blaze is down 60%. Breitbart is down 87%. This is worse than the dips and traffic we're seeing for mainstream outlets like CNN, 20% dip. New York Times 22% dip during the same four-year period.

Are conservatives spending less time reading about politics, or do you think as David French argued this week in The New York Times, conservative right-wing readers are increasingly spending their time on Elon Musk's X or other right-wing social media?

Philip Bump: I think it's probably more the latter. One of the things that we saw over the course of the past 15 years or so is you had Fox News, this behemoth on the right. It started to be challenged from the right by sites like Breitbart, and eventually sites like the conspiracy site Gateway Pundit. You had these people who were willing to feed the demand of further right content.

Donald Trump was successful in 2015, 2016 I would argue, because he echoed the themes that were emerging from that further right world of conservative media and conservative thought. He would frequently cite articles from Breitbart, and so on, and so forth. What happened is that social media made it so that you could move very easily even further right. You didn't have to put together a website, you didn't have to put together a news article with an extensible reporter reporting it out, you can just say stuff, and you could get attention.

One of the better-known people in the conservative social media world is this guy who calls himself Catturd. He sat down for an interview with Tucker Carlson and the interview revealed that he didn't really know that much about politics, but he just has this ability to respond in real-time to what's happening and frame things in a way that is viewed appreciatively by the right, and it's made him very successful. You don't need to be Breitbart to do that anymore, and you can gain clout.

Even because of the way that Musk has set up the platform now, you can get money from it. That is an unusual driver of the decline that we're seeing among conservative media outlets. It is extremely bad to have one of the principal drivers of the national conversation be a guy named Catturd who gets retweeted by the President.

Micah Loewinger: Philip, thank you very much.

Philip Bump: You bet.

Micah Loewinger: Philip Bump is a columnist for The Washington Post, and the author of the weekly newsletter, How to Read This Chart.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, before we argue about conflict in Palestine, we have to talk about colonization and colonialism and know the difference.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.