In 2011, political challenger Andrew Breitbart a sign warned Fox News claims that if America isn’t careful, Donald Trump could become president one day. A year later, Breitbart died, and his longtime associate, billionaire maid Steve Bannon, has taken over the far right’s cherished website. He would use the site to help Trump do just that.

When Bannon took over Breitbart in 2012, Trump was just beginning to toy with running for president, buoyed by conversations she had with David Bossiethe president of Citizens United (the organization that was successful sued FEC to unleash black money on the US political system). Bossie was too a friend of Bannon’sand Citizens United got big financial donations from Bannon’s associate, billionaire Bob Mercer. Bannon actually met Trump for the first time in 2011. through Bossie. As Trump prepared for a presidential run, so be it funded in part by Mercer and coordinated by Bannon, Breitbart (who was also receiving funding from Mercer) began producing a steady stream of right-wing content as well as commentators would claimhelped pave the way for the MAGA movement.

Ultimately, Breitbart journalists denounced the site, describing it—as the Los Angeles Times once put it on— that he sacrificed his “editorial independence and became a mouthpiece for Trump.” Indeed, in 2016, following Trump’s election victory, former Breitbart spokesman Kurt Bardella he told reporters: “It will be the propaganda arm of the administration.” He added that the site’s mandate was to “create conflict, controversy and division” and that it would be used to support Trump. Ben Shapiro, himself now a pro-Trump apologistsonce claimed that Bannon transformed Breitbart “in Trump’s Personal Pravda”, a reference to the once prominent propaganda publication of the Soviet Union.

Almost ten years later, as Bannon gets out of a federal prison and Trump preparing to return to the White House, it seems that something very similar to what happened in 2016 has happened again.

In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter. The deal was controversial, dramatic and, from the outside, largely unfathomable. Why did the richest man in the world – a man who already owned half a dozen companies— Do you want to buy one of the biggest social media platforms in the world? Public speculation ran the gamut but he didn’t come up with any real answers. Shortly after the acquisition was completed, Musk fired a most of the site staff and renamed it “X”. Since then, it has grown more and more right and, before the presidential election, it allowed Musk to algorithmically promote a series of conspiracy theories and disinformation that proved ancillary to the Trump campaign’s messaging. The problem for Musk was that X is not profitable. The site seems to have no long term business strategy except losing tons of money.

However, in the context of the 2024 presidential election, Musk’s deal with Twitter finally seems to make some sense. Indeed, if one of the main purposes of the acquisition was to transform the platform into a propaganda megaphone on a global scale for Trump’s campaign, then Musk’s other decisions while running the site (most of which defies all basic business logic) seem more reasonable. The reward was not the actual income of the platform (which decreased by 80 percent since Musk took over) but a political victory for Trump that would give Musk unparalleled access to major branches of the US government. It also explains Musk’s increasingly dramatic anticsbecause they can be read as an integral part of an overall propaganda effort. From a business perspective, you tell advertisers your website to “go to hell” themselves it doesn’t make sense. From the point of view of someone who wants to represent himself as an avatar of “free speech”, however (and thereby win a significant portion of the audience to your political cause) it makes sense. In the days since Trump won the election, Musk’s staff net worth increased by $20 billion.

Elon is an idiot. He spent $44 billion on Twitter and all he got was control of all 3 branches of the federal government.

— Whole Mars Catalog (@WholeMarsBlog) November 6, 2024

In both 2016 and 2024, the right-wing political movement track looks remarkably similar. From this writer’s perspective, the play is this: organized money, backed by right-wing billionaires, hijacks a media platform, which then proceeds to produce a deluge of right-wing content. In many cases, the content seems intended to anger certain segments of the electorate, thereby forcing them to support a preferred political candidate (in both cases, Donald Trump). In Breitbart’s case, the site still apparently produced news. In the case of X, Musk even abandoned the trappings of legitimate news content and unleashed a veritable fire hose of propaganda shit in what had once been considered America’s digital “public commons”.

While there’s no hard evidence that Musk’s motivation for buying Twitter was to help get Donald Trump elected, there’s no disputing that’s what Musk did with the platform once he ran it.

As in 2016, Trump’s 2024 campaign has put to work his ability to enrage his base with a mixture of anger, resentment and paranoia. To that end, Musk’s X has helped promulgate an almost unrelenting deluge of racist conspiracy theories related to immigration and the current administration. Trump has also leaned heavily into the alternative media ecosystem of podcasts and social networks that are heavily weighted toward young men — a central constituency that helped him win. Even many of those podcasts received a shout right after Trump’s victory earlier this week.

There is really only one conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing, and that is that the political right is incredibly adept at using media and technology to its electoral advantage. Indeed, many of the media strategies Bannon pioneered during Trump’s 2016 campaign feel like they’ve been refined or drastically amplified by Musk during this election cycle.

It should be recalled that in 2016, Bannon’s Trump-related efforts also used his ties to Cambridge Analytica, a company formed by the SCL Group, a longtime defense contractor (with ties to US Department of State) that specialized in psychological warfare.

It could be argued that Twitter as a platform gave Musk the combined powers of what Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica had previously given Bannon: it functioned as both a media megaphone and a way to collect and centralize data about the American public, both of which could then be used to enhance an overall electoral strategy. (There’s no way to tell if any of that data was useful or not, of course.) In 2016, Facebook was central to Bannon’s effort. Cambridge Analytica collected data on segments of the US population from Facebook for the purpose political advertisingin a notorious case that ended in Congressional hearings. In Musk’s case, he bought a platform similar to Facebook and took it private, thereby avoiding any kind of outside scrutiny.

Late last year, I argued that Twitter was not significantly different under Musk than it had been under Jack Dorsey. Of course, that was a long time ago, and things are very different now. I still maintain that Twitter was never a particularly good website – and that its original version should not be glorified as an ideal public platform. At the same time, it’s clear that Musk took a site that had significant railings, ditched them, and proceeded to mold the site in his own image (that image, apparently, is a mean sack).

The real question is what Musk will do next. Bannon left Breitbart in 2018shortly after Trump ascended to the White House and never looked back. It remains to be seen whether Musk will continue his tenure at X or part ways with the platform. As a means of delivering messages at scale, X will clearly continue to be useful to Musk and other Trump acolytes during the next administration. That being said, how do you continue to support a media operation that is hemorrhaging money? Funding the site is what it will have to deal with in the coming years if the propaganda continues.