KThree days after taking over the short message service Twitter for $44 billion and firing several top managers, including former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, Elon Musk is now fueling conspiracy theories there. There is a “tiny possibility that there is more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk wrote of the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, at Pelosi’s residence. Pelosi is in the hospital with a fractured skull after being seriously injured with a hammer by the assailant, police said a 42-year-old named David DePape.
In response to a tweet by Hilary Clinton strongly condemning the attack on Paul Pelosi, Musk directed his 112 million followers to a crude story that claimed Paul Pelosi was drunk at the time of the attack and engaged in a fight with a male prostitute – and not, as the investigating police in San Francisco reported, was attacked by a man with certified right-wing extremist statements.
This story has been circulating in right-wing circles for several days. Its propagators include former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Trump’s confidante Roger Stone and right-wing conservative author and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza, who falsely accused election fraud with his documentary “2000 Mules”. claimed to prove. All of these figures spread the claim that the Democrats wanted to generate sympathy for the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who was hated in right-wing circles, with a so-called “false flag” operation, i.e. with invented circumstances, shortly before the congressional elections on November 8th.
The American mainstream media had widely framed the attack on Pelosi’s husband, who is hospitalized with a fractured skull, as an attack on American democracy, blaming the belligerent rhetoric of prominent right-wing politicians and television talkers. However, they rushed to fuel the weird conspiracy theory surrounding Paul Pelosi.
The conspiracy story first appeared in the Santa Monica Observer, a tabloid that had previously drawn attention to made-up stories, including that Hillary Clinton was dead and a body double played the role in the debate against Donald Trump. There, an anonymous author (“I could disappear if I tell you the truth – if I do, you know why”) pieced together rumors and “theories” from so-called “sources” into a hair-raising tale that Pelosi got drunk and in underwear provided a scuffle with a homosexual nudist from the Castro, San Francisco’s famous gay district. The half-silk story spread like wildfire on social networks.
Musk’s tweet referencing the “Santa Monica Observer” has since been deleted. In an open letter to potential advertisers, Musk recently asserted that Twitter would “of course not” become a platform “where anything can be said without consequences.” Instead, the short message service wants to be “the most respectable advertising platform in the world.”
