Gab Gets It

It does me very little good to be “off Twitter” if all I do is write about Twitter. I’m still Very Online, I still scroll, I still keep up with the latest happenings. The only real different is now I’m a hypocrite as well as an addict. It’s got to stop, I told myself yesterday. No more writing about the lumpy one. There’s a whole world of politics out there, a firehose of weirdness to drink from.

And then, this morning, I opened my inbox and my very first message was “Musk Is In Over His Head” from Gab.com.

For those who do not know, Gab is easily the most abhorent of all the right-wing Twitter alternatives. Let me put it this way: at CPAC Dallas, standing in line to get my complementary copy of One Vote Away autographed by Ted Cruz, I started chatting with the people standing next to me. The topic turned to social media alternatives: Truth Social, Gettr, Parler. “What about Gab?” I asked. Everyone went silent. “I’m not a big fan of Gab,” the person behind me said. We moved on quickly.

If Gab sounds familiar to you it might be because it’s the only non-Chan site heavily associated with an act of domestic terrorism: the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh back in 2018. The platform is barely a step up from Telegram when it comes to hate speech and actual Nazi presence. Andrew Torba, Gab’s founder, is a Christian Nationalist, by which I mean he recently self-published a book called Christian Nationalism.

I have a Gab account because I have an account on every platform that matters — you heard me, post.news — which means sometimes I wake up to a Gab newsletter in my inbox. The letter always reads like a dispatch from another planet where everyone speaks perfect English. Torba has a radical honesty common among the farthest of the far-right folks. There’s no reading between the lines with him; he’ll tell you exactly what he’s thinking. And what he’s thinking is usually very weird.

I’ve written about the Gab newsletter before — “On Christian Masculinity” inspired not one but three articles in the early days of this Substack. Today I’m barely going to write about Torba’s latest masterwork. I’m just going to let it sing to you on its own:

Hey Torba, love what you’re doing so far, quick question: If gender is so static, isn’t everything Musk does by definition male? Why are gender essentialists so obsessed with policing gender? It’s almost like they know it’s a social construct that has to be constantly reinforced or it will go away forever…

This is my favorite paragraph maybe ever because it’s so right and so wrong all at once. The best right wrong sentence is the last one. Musk’s “flailing, hyper-feminine emotioal outbursts” have been terrible for business; they haven’t just tanked Twitter, they’ve tanked Tesla by proxy. Advertisers are fleeing for the hills, the platform is falling apart. And yet. Torba might be right. Musk might be doing all these things for the sake of business expediency. Which is hilarious and would make Torba’s sellout claim the most vicious barb of the entire letter.

Imagine how completely uncoupled from general society you have to be to think that revulsion at a swastika is restricted to “California types.” The mind boggles.

Credit where credit is due, though: Torba is what Elon pretends to be. This is what free speech absolutism looks like. If forced tolerance of actual goddamn Nazis makes you uncomfortable, you might not be as much of an absolutist as you think you are. Your discomfort is good and healthy actually. An ancient meme offers the metaphor of a potluck. Whatever food you bring to the gathering, there’s probably room for it on the table no matter how poorly cooked it is or how many people in the room dislike it. But you cannot put a steaming platter of dog poop on the table. This would be dangerous and also ruin the potluck for everyone.

The potluck of ideas is harder to manage in that many ideas fall somewhere on the spectrum between “food” and “dogshit,” but the theory remains the same and anyway, there should be no debate about which end of the spectrum the swastika occupies.

Anyway, back to Torba being the wrongest rightest person on the Internet this morning:

Emphasis mine. A perfect sentence. Torba has collapsed several hideous ideas into just 26 word — ideas that should not be shared — and yet my desire to create a bot account to reply to every Elon tweet with just that sentence is almost overpowering. No notes.

The letter goes on but we lose very little by ending it here, with the man so recently against expedient business decisions attempting to seduce journalists banned from Twitter into joining the most far-right platform of them all. The offer of free speech haven for wayward left-of-centers sounds like a challenge, and I’m not saying I’m going to test their commitment to open expression but I’m not not saying it either.

Anyway, congratulations to Torba for delivering the worst best Elon Musk takedown on a takedown-heavy Internet this morning.

Americafest proper starts this afternoon with an “educator’s summit” — I assume we will be learning how to not groom children into happy and well-adjusted degenerate queers. Did I mention Matt Gaetz is here? He’s here. Gonna be a wild four days…

I’m not yet sure whether I’m going to do a daily report or wait until it’s over to write something, but rest assured I will be writing about it. Yesterday was registration: my accomplishments so far include losing my first conference badge within fifteen minutes of receiving it, getting clocked as a Rolling Stone reporter, and decimating an open bar at the TPUSA Headquarters Block Party. I’m going to go back to sleep now and prepare for another long night. No one should be allowed to have this much fun.