Elon Musk and His Guerrilla Communications War
Twitter-X scam alert: Inventing "Venezuelan Invaders," Musk is trying to drive a wedge between the Black community and Latinos, and it's working
According to Block Club Chicago, a Chicago-based news service, Elon Musk has been promoting the idea that Venezuelans have taken over a Chicago apartment building.
Libs of TikTok is a terrorist organization that targets the LGBTQ+ community. Musk is reposting their inventions to his millions of gullible followers.
32? Wow. That’s a lot of armed Venezuelans (they also spell it wrong). Must be a yuuuuuge apartment building.
It’s also a fabricated number. Right out of the air (but the followers of these accounts are supposed to be impressed by the long list of Chicago Police dispatches).
According to Block Club:
Chicago police spokesperson Peggy Benz on Tuesday confirmed officers responded to a call for service to the building, but officers found nothing matching the report at the scene and no report was generated.
The claim was also refuted by the area’s alderwoman. But the misinformation went viral anyways, particularly catching on among right wing social media accounts.
The alderwoman in the ward where the apartment building is located was incensed:
“That did not happen,” Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th) said. The only calls the alderperson has received concerning the alleged incident are regarding the social media posts, and are not from neighbors who live in the area, Taylor said.
If the Justice Department investigated this, they’d probably discover it was a call made by a 4Channer, Libs of TikTok goon, or Musk fanboi. It’s a new form of Swatting.
But it’s too late.
If you don’t think this stuff is seeping in through the political ecosphere anyway, I need to report that one of my friends here in Atlanta repeated it. In fact, that’s how I heard about it in the first place.
He’s a Black man in his 40s who usually knows better, but when I told him after I looked into it that it was bullshit, he said, “It’s all over on TikTok. They’ve confirmed it.”
They being the TikTok news service, which has no official name, of course, but can turn around bullshit stories like this on a dime and embed them quickly into the body politic. They then become true, even when they’re not.
But it isn’t just my friend who is falling for this. Block Club tried to dig a little deeper, but its reporters were scared off by a gang of vigilantes responding to the Libs of TikTok concoction:
More than a dozen people were gathered at the complex’s gates Tuesday afternoon. As Block Club approached to ask questions, one person declined on behalf of the group and told the reporter to leave the block.
I bring up the fact that my friend is Black because Musk has clearly decided to be Trump’s secret weapon in a guerrilla communications war against American society. He is following the Gregg Abbott playbook.
Abbott, you may recall, began sending migrants to Chicago two years ago to not only be cruel to migrants but to help polarize the city of Chicago. He sent the migrants by bus to the most housing-challenged parts of the city. Places with food deserts, unemployment, and crime.
But the city of Chicago, mostly, has responded with care instead of revenge or hate.
According to the Chicago Tribune:
More than 47,200 — mostly from Venezuela — have passed through Chicagoland and tens of thousands have settled here. Local officials have opened up over 20 buildings to temporarily house them and spent hundreds of millions of dollars. They’ve watched their hospitals, schools and food pantries fill with record numbers of people.
And, believe it or not, the response has been largely successful. Private charities, armed with bread, butter, and love, have filled most of the gaps left by city and state programs designed to help migrants. There have been problems. Some migrants are struggling. But by and large, the city has succeeded in helping migrants who’ve chosen to stay.
The Libs of TikTok, in case you haven’t heard of them, is a slimy organization that helped lead to the death of Nex Benedict, the trans kid who got murdered in an Oklahoma bathroom (the cause of death was officially suicide, but Fuck You, Oklahoma).
The name of the group is an intended mockery, part of the obsession of the terrorist right to “own the libs.” Before Nex’s death, they engaged in an extended campaign against the trans community in Oklahoma. This kind of thing gets the children of nasty haters in a lather, so they start beating up kids they think don’t quite fit the image they have in the vacant lots of their brains.
The fact that Elon Musk reposts Libs of TikTok nonsense says all you need to know about Musk. The fact that the orange mouth of methane sat for a long interview with them while attending their conference should alarm anyone who has a soul.
The Libs of TikTok first came up with this idea about apartment building takeovers when they found a news story in Aurora, Colorado. They managed to make a similar story go viral when they claimed that a Venezuelan gang had seized an Aurora apartment building.
According to Denver’s Channel Seven news, this, too, was a bogus report:
APD investigated a claim of a Venezuelan gang takeover of an apartment building but found no evidence that gang members were in control.
Interim Aurora Police Chief Heather Morris said in a police-provided interview that officers found no evidence of a gang takeover.
Aurora, a suburb near Denver, acknowledges a gang issue from a local Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua (TdA), but insists that the problem is fairly isolated:
According to an Aurora city statement:
"Yes, we are concerned that there is a small Tren de Aragua (TdA) presence in Aurora and we have been taking it seriously. We have responded. We have made arrests. We will continue to make arrests. We will continue to address the problems that the absentee, out-of-state owners of these properties have allowed to fester unchecked.”
Did you read that last sentence? The one about absentee, out-of-state owners of these properties? This is a problem that Kamala Harris has addressed. When out-of-town owners, often, these days, hedge funds with no interest in the management part of property management, own large properties, trouble brews.
The fact that the so-called troublemakers are occasionally Venezuelan is insignificant. If not Venezuelan, they’d be some other group.
Wherever there is a lack of social services, employment, and educational opportunities, there is crime. Just ask JD Vance’s family in Appalachia. No. Wait. Don’t do that. They’ll blow your head to pieces with a sawed-off (they can’t afford AR-15s).
I think what we are seeing here is part of a larger effort by Musk to promote false news reports to sow discontent.
It’s part of a guerrilla communications war. He’s got a toy for which he paid $40 million, and now he has a lot of artillery thanks to the scummy groups he plays tag with.
This problem is likely to get worse before it gets better, and we need tools to fight it, since the U.S. Justice Department, under the sleepy, unwatchful eyes of Merrick Garland, shows no interest in addressing it.
I dunno. Do we need a regular Substack to monitor all of Elon Musk’s amphetamine-infused fake news posts and reposts? Something robust enough to alert the public every time he does it?
If we do, someone else with a lot more reach than I have will need to do it.
Either way, expect more of this from Musk’s guerrilla war headquarters.