This lie identifies as true. Last week, as storm clouds gathered, authoritarian media personalities, state propagandists, and radical ideologues looked up at the sky and screamed. It was their dreaded Day Zero — the billionaire shitposting god of tech had finally taken Twitter private. At the time, I made a few predictions, one of which almost immediately came true: within hours of taking control of the company, every abusive comment on the platform abruptly became the property of Elon Musk, Twitter’s new commander-in-chief, who single-handedly invented racism sometime late last week. In this regard, deranged commentary from the media was, and remains, no idle bit of mud-slinging, but rather an integral piece of a roughly coherent strategy to starve Twitter of advertising revenue.

With the influence of our authoritarian ruling class so publicly challenged, even if only in this single space, even if only in theory, authoritarians have naturally escalated the information war. If they can’t control the platform, they will do everything they can to destroy it. And the one thing uniquely within the scope of their talents? A widespread dissemination of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal had only been fired a couple hours when Ben Collins, NBC’s chief “misinformation expert,” retweeted a thinly-veiled charge from popular activist Alejandra Caraballo: