RUTHFULLY YOURS

So the Guardian has flounced off of X. With characteristic pomposity it announced this week that it will no longer post its articles on this ‘toxic media platform’. X has become a volcanic mess of noxious opinion since evil Elon Musk took over, say the crybabies of Kings Place. So they’re off, to Bluesky, whatever that is. Quite how X’s users will cope without such fine journalism as ‘My toddler is vegan. What’s the problem?’ and ‘What if the mega-rich just want rocket ships to escape the Earth they destroy?’ remains to be seen.

The Guardian charges Musk with letting X be overrun with ‘disturbing content’. This once nice joint now simmers with ‘far-right conspiracy theories and racism’, it says. Let’s leave to one side the industrial-strength gall it must require for a media group that wanged on for years about how Brexit was the handiwork of a ‘shadowy global operation’ spending oodles of ‘dark money’ to accuse anyone else of being a conspiratorial crackpot. The more striking thing is the Guardian’s fantastically haughty refusal to hang out anywhere there are people who have a different opinion.

Let’s be real: that’s what this hissy fit is about, this exodus of the entitled, this fleeing of the self-important from X. They just can’t abide being around people who like Trump and don’t like mass immigration and think lesbians don’t have cocks. Musk’s true crime, in their eyes, was to open X up to views that lie outside the fiercely policed parameters of correct think. Their ‘X-odus’ is an oik-avoidance strategy, a retreat from the madding crowd of lowly opinion-havers into the safety of the liberal echo chamber where everyone agrees Trump is Hitler, Brexit is ‘Brexshit’ and Eddie Izzard is a woman.

It was summed up in a column in the Guardian about the Guardian’s abandonment of X. (The Guardian’s favourite topic of discussion is itself.) ‘Hell is other people’, the writer cries. ‘Or, more specifically, other people on social media.’ Of late, she says, X has become ‘the digital equivalent of a pub notorious for glassing at chucking-out time’, whereas Bluesky hosts a ‘more measured, less emotive conversation’. The hints of class hatred are delicious. X is depicted as a shady pub in the chavvy bit of town while Bluesky is apparently akin to the hot-desking zone at Soho House. God bless the Guardian, they gave mingling with the masses their best shot but it’s just not for them.

One thing the Guardian really came to hate on X was the dreaded community note, which is when users can collaboratively correct a post they feel is misleading. Guardian posts on Brexit and Net Zero and other matters were often targeted by these organic swarms of sceptics. That’s the ‘glassing’ they feared – the shoving of the glass of public doubt into the face of elite ideology. Just imagine how painful it was for the posh and virtuous of the Guardian to have some sunburned bloke with the England flag in his social-media bio waging a war of community notes against their online blather. The horror!

The least convincing thing in the Guardian’s smug justification for its retreat from X is its cry that Musk is using the platform ‘to shape political discourse’. Now, this is true, of course. Musk is not shy about his conversion to the cause of Trump. He took every opportunity to push Trumpism on X in the run-up to the presidential election. Yet the idea that the Guardian has some classically liberal hatred for billionaires using their swag and clout to shape politics is bullshit. The Guardian was fine with Twitter, as it was then, when a ‘nicer’ breed of Silicon Valley fat cat was using it to big up the Dems, silence pesky feminists and gag anyone judged to be ‘far right’. What really horrifies the Guardian is that its class of anti-populist, post-truth graduate hysterics has lost control of X. It hates Musk not for stomping his political bootprint on X but for erasing its own.

The Guardian was fine with X when it was banning women for life for saying ‘he’ about a man who tried to pressure immigrant women to wax his bollocks. And when it was banning the president of the United States himself on a jumped-up charge of incitement to violence. And when it made itself the militant wing of the FBI by dutifully censoring ‘Russian propaganda’, which basically meant anything that might harm the Democratic establishment and the broader ‘liberal’ order. The vain fleeing of X by the Guardian and others is a temper tantrum of the politically entitled, a cry of impotent rage by a class of influencers who have watched as their influence has dwindled. Worse, as it’s been ‘glassed’ by the plebs.

The X-odus is ridiculous and pompous. I’m loving it. But something serious, even borderline historic, is at play too. The old ruling ideologies are creaking and cracking under the weight of populist dissatisfaction. The old guard is in retreat, fearing the cries and ridicule of an amassing army of doubters and cynics. Is their dangerous nonsense defeated? Nope. It’s wounded, though. And that’s a start.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy