Musk’s Many Big Lies

Tracking One of Elon Musk’s Many Big Lies

No, the Democrats are not planning to erase the First Amendment.

David Corn

Every once in a while, it’s good to take a hard look at a particular lie of the many spewed by a narcissistic, dangerous, demagogic, and hate-feeding billionaire who has tremendous influence over the national political discussion. Of course, I’m talking about Elon Musk.

Musk literally jumped the shark this past weekend (see above) when he appeared with Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the July assassination attempt on the GOP nominee. Musk leaped about like a jester and fear-mongered when he got his time at the microphone. He falsely proclaimed of the Democrats, “The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech. They want to take away your right to bear arms. They want to take away your right to vote, effectively.” And he darkly warned that if Trump doesn’t win, “this will be the last election.”

Over the past year, Musk has slipped increasingly into the fever swamp of MAGAland and become a record-setting purveyor of disinformation (while also amplifying racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic posts). It’s even possible that he’s responsible for more false messages on social media than Trump. (Musk has zapped out numerous posts on X claiming Democrats are bringing illegal immigrants into the United States so these migrants can vote for the Ds—a baseless conspiracy theory.) A study conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in the first seven months of 2024, Musk’s false or misleading claims about the US election generated 1.2 billion views. “Elon Musk is abusing his privileged position as owner of a small, but politically influential, social media platform to sow disinformation that generates discord and distrust,” said Imran Ahmed, the center’s CEO. (In March, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit Musk had brought against the center that blamed it for the loss of tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue after the center reported on the rise of hate speech and misinformation on X.) Last week, the New York Times reported that of 171 posts Musk put up on X in a recent five-day period, almost a third were false or misleading. These phony-baloney posts were viewed more than 800 million times.

With all the lies and crap that Musk hurls at X users—and that the site’s algorithm seems to highlight—how can one pick a single falsehood to examine? And why even bother? Well, I believe it remains important to explore how Musk concocts his lies, and one just happened to catch my attention a few days ago. I decided to dig in.

On September 30, Musk tweeted that John Kerry, the former US senator and secretary of state, “wants to violate the Constitution.” Within a week, this post had received 19.2 million views. It included a clip of Kerry, who until this year served as a special climate change envoy for President Joe Biden, speaking recently at a panel on climate change at the World Economic Forum. John Kerry explicitly saying he aims to undermine the US Constitution? Really? How so?

I recalled I had recently seen that Matt Taibbi, the once Musk-friendly, lefty-turned-right journalist, had mounted a similar attack on Kerry. The day before Musk threw up this tweet, Taibbi had appeared as a speaker at the so-called “Rescue the Republic Rally” in Washington, DC, which featured a roster of fringe-ish dead-enders, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Brand (the onetime actor who has been accused of sexual assault—charges he has denied), Jordan Peterson (a manosphere influencer), and former Saturday Night Live not-so-funny-man Rob Schneider. The Wall Street Journal called it the “Coalition of the Weird.”

At this shindig, Taibbi slammed Kerry:

Disagreement is seen as threat, and according to John Kerry, must be “hammered out of existence.” The former presidential candidate just complained at a World Economic Forum meeting that “it’s really hard to govern” and “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to the important work of hammering out unhealthy choices…Kerry added that it’s “really hard to build consensus,” and told Forum members they need to “win the right to govern” and “be free to implement change.” What do they need to be free of? The First Amendment.

I don’t know how much attention Musk pays to Taibbi these days—Taibbi, at Musk’s behest, produced the misleading Twitter Files falsely asserting government censorship yet then had a falling out with the boy-billionaire—but Musk picked up on this point with his tweet slamming Kerry as a foe of the Constitution. Several days later, Musk went further, tweeting, “The Democratic Party is openly stating that they want to change the Constitution to end free speech!” In this post, he referenced an article from the Daily Wire, the far-right site run by Ben Shapiro. That piece claimed Kerry had said that if Democrats win the 2024 election, they will change the First Amendment to fight disinformation.

Let’s look at what Kerry did say:

The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growning and growing and growing. It’s part of our problem, particularly in our democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we use to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have been eviscerated to a certain degree. People self-select where they go for their news and for their information. And then you just get into a vicious cycle. So it’s really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in the 45, 50 years I’ve been involved in this. There’s a lot of discussion now about how do you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But, look, if people go to only one source and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.

So what we need is to win the ground with the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes so you’re free to be able to implement change. Now obviously there are some people in our country prepared to implement change in other ways…I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they could move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges we are facing. And to me that is what part of this race, this election, is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?

Read that again. Is this a call from Kerry to undo the First Amendment? He clearly was bemoaning the fact that disinformation on climate change from many sources poisons the discourse on how to meet this challenge. (At the recent vice presidential debate, JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, indicated he had no problem with Trump declaring climate change a “hoax.”) In fact, Kerry acknowledged that the First Amendment prevents the government from hammering disinformation “out of existence.” The only course of action, he said, was to win politically and achieve enough of a majority that will allow the government to take decisive action on this front (say, capturing the White House and large majorities in the House and Senate). His goal, obviously, was to change policies related to climate change, not to change the First Amendment.

It’s nuts for Musk, Taibbi, or anyone else to claim that Kerry was calling for killing the First Amendment. Yet they did so anyway. And several other conservative sites—including the National Review and Real Clear Politics—ran articles pushing the line that Kerry was down on the First Amendment. Sputnik, the Russian propaganda outlet, posted a story highlighting Musk’s claim that Democrats intend to “destroy” the Constitution. Musk had provided fuel for Moscow’s disinformation operation.

Musk and Taibbi were lying about Kerry. It was easy to fact-check them on this. But I don’t think they care about being caught mangling reality for political purposes. They both are driven by the need to push false narratives that demonize Democrats and progressives to make the topsy-turvy case that the Ds and the libs, not Trump (who refused to accept the election results in 2020, schemed to overturn them, and incited an insurrectionist riot at the Capitol), are the true threats to American democracy.

This one lie about Kerry—one of many falsehoods Musk, Taibbi, and their comrades peddle—shows how desperate they are to portray Democrats as censorious foes of the republic. (Remember Vance at the debate last week trying to change the subject from January 6 to Democrats smothering free speech?) They have little, if any, evidence of this, so they make stuff up. (Meanwhile, they have not much to say about Republicans banning books.) Like Trump, Musk imperils democracy by aiming a firehose of vicious lies at voters. These statements are readily debunked. Yet through his ownership of X, Musk creates a mighty flood of disinformation that perverts the national debate. He shows that the threat to the nation doesn’t come from those he (wrongly) claims to be enemies of free speech but from those who use their free speech privileges to purposefully spread false information to advance their own interests and a dangerous political agenda.