We Get Our Violence in High-Def Ultra Realism
Violent videos on Elon Musk's X are little more than a fascist recruiting tool.
[Warning: The following essay includes disturbing descriptions of violence.]
Agitation is the best way I can describe it: A kind of emotional itching beneath the skin that cannot be scratched, a feeling that something is terribly wrong and it cannot be made right.
That’s how I feel when I come across hyper-violent videos on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter. Why and how do I see such tremendously fucked up videos? I sometimes click through to the profiles of new followers who use fascist dog whistles in their posts and could pose a problem for me on the platform. Scanning the X profiles and timelines of these folks usually reveal three things: They hate women, they love Jesus, and they absorb a never-ending stream of violent imagery designed to reinforce their political beliefs, particularly the racist ones.
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That Elon Musk’s X platform has become a megaphone for far-right causes and wild-eyed, democracy-threatening conspiracies goes without saying, including in mainstream media outlets, where the political radicalization of the world’s richest man is not being treated as the dire development it is. But the proliferation of the most heinous videos of violence and death has gone without any notice at all in the coverage of international fascism’s central social media hub.
Perhaps you’re lucky enough to have never stumbled across these videos. I highly recommend you keep it that way unless you, like me, don’t mind torturing yourself by exposing your brain to the rotten content your political enemies consume every minute of every day. These videos range from short clips of people being shot to death in the street to men punching and kicking women as they beg for mercy to groups of teenagers ganging up on a kid and beating them until they are no longer conscious.
In no way should these videos be widely available for anyone to see. It is a failure of both government and society that anyone – even children – can log on to Musk’s fascist wonderland and watch a ninety second clip of someone being brutally beaten through the lens of a security camera or a smartphone. It is an abuse of the First Amendment that this content can be accessed by anyone at any time. To take that one step further: It’s an abuse of free speech that X is allowed to exist at all. Brazil’s Supreme Court has it right. No democracy should tolerate the anti-democratic impulses of Musk and those spreading Kremlin-funded disinformation through right-wing media channels. In the Information Wars – which rage in ways that go undetected by normal folks just trying to get through their day – democracies are at a distinct disadvantage against their fascist opponents until elected officials make the difficult but necessary decision to pull the plug on Elon’s Pretty Little Hate Machine. It’s a discussion that must enter the mainstream before it’s too late.
It’s not that I enjoy watching a few seconds of the videos that are splashed all over the timelines of red-pilled people who follow me on the X platform (Obviously I use the block button liberally there and on BlueSky, which fascists have infiltrated in increasing numbers). I’ve written Bad Faith Times pieces on trying to put myself into the mindset of those whose politics disgust me and pose a danger to society at large. I think (I hope) this might offer some insight into how these folks think, why they believe what they believe, and why they are so hopelessly attracted to the allure of authoritarianism and the whispers of the worms that have burrowed so deep into their brains. I suppose, if I’m going to play my own shrink for a moment, that I do this because I think I can fix these people, that there is an antidote to what ails them, a way to drive out the brain worms once and for all. Obviously this is a quixotic quest that probably constitutes self harm more than it does help for others. Nevertheless, I persist.
These hideously violent videos naturally have a political context; this is not just violence for the sake of violence, but violence that has two critical functions in the nurturing of the fascist mind: To construct a reality in which people you hate are universally violent in an almost animalistic way, and to provide political cover for the policies required to address this supposed societal blight. That these videos are often posted or reposted by far-right accounts with massive followings is not a coincidence. It is a game plan. It is a strategy.
Many of the videos I’ve been unfortunate enough to come across in recent months follow a script of sorts: They show black men committing violent acts against white women; they show groups of young people of color fighting white people; they depict context-free scenes of supposed migrants in western nations chastising and threatening old (white) ladies. The theme is universal: These people – folks you fear because they threaten your cultural and political domination – are irredeemably evil and must be dealt with in the harshest terms possible. There’s a perverse comfort for fascists who watch these videos and share them online. These images being beamed into their rotten brains are saying softly that they were right all along about These People, that you should not feel bad about hating them, that the policy prescriptions of Donald Trump and his allies are the medicine for this sickness.
Violence, after all, must be met with violence. This is an all-too-convenient reality for the politics they favor.
The ‘Bloody Story’ And Its Impact
Research shows this kind of online content won’t necessarily rile up people who have violent proclivities, though they may be more likely to seek out heinous videos on Elon’s site and beyond. Hyper-violent videos and images have a greater effect on what Mount Sinai researchers deemed “non-aggressive” people. Violent imagery, in other words, can create an aggressive, fearful person where once there was none.
Interestingly, while watching scenes from violent movies, the aggressive group had less brain activity than the non-aggressive group in the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region associated by past studies with emotion-related decision making and self-control. The aggressive subjects described feeling more inspired and determined and less upset or nervous than non-aggressive participants when watching violent (day 1) versus just emotional (day 2) media. In line with these responses, while watching the violent media, aggressive participants’ blood pressure went down progressively with time while the non-aggressive participants experienced a rise in blood pressure.
“How an individual responds to their environment depends on the brain of the beholder,” said Dr. Alia-Klein, a Mount Sanai researcher who studied the effects of violent images in 2014. “Aggression is a trait that develops together with the nervous system over time starting from childhood; patterns of behavior become solidified and the nervous system prepares to continue the behavior patterns into adulthood when they become increasingly coached in personality. This could be at the root of the differences in people who are aggressive and not aggressive, and how media motivates them to do certain things.”
In this way, violent videos designed to incite discriminatory passions are a recruiting tool on X and other platforms that make money from such wretched imagery. These videos don’t just fire up the hate-filled, fear-filled viewer. They turn decent folks into monsters. They grow the fascist movement, which is fear itself. Think back to the 2017 Charlottesville neo-nazi riots. Those people were deeply afraid of what they perceived as the elimination of their culture. You could see it in their faces lit by the fire of their stupid fucking tiki torches: Fearful men lashing out in one massive spasm of violence.
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