NBC News’ Ben Collins blasted Elon Musk for contributing — as the new CEO of Twitter — to the conspiracy theories surrounding the attack on Paul Pelosi.
Collins joined Morning Joe for a Monday panel discussion on how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was assaulted over the weekend by a hammer-wielding man seemingly driven by beliefs frequently espoused by Donald Trump’s supporters.
As Collins dove into the attacker’s adherence of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, he remarked on the fact that the attacker’s name is still trending on Twitter a day after Musk amplified a dubious story about the attack from a fringe website.
Musk deleted his tweet promoting the story amid outrage, but Collins blamed Musk for fueling the spread of false information in connection with the attack.
Lies on the internet move faster than the truth, and that’s, in part, why there are all of these safeguards that Elon Musk is trying to take down on Twitter right now. The lies that were pushed were from bad pieces of information they found. For example, they said that Paul Pelosi was in his underwater. Of course he was, at 2:30 in the morning, at the time he was attacked. That led them to believe this was a lover’s quarrel between two different people that knew each other. The reason they believed they knew each other is because police put out a statement saying they didn’t really know who opened the door. That led them to believe there was a third person in the house.
So from there, there was this world-building on the pro-Trump internet. What could be the opposite of reality here? And the opposite of reality they came up with was these two people were having a lover’s quarrel in the house, and the police sort of intruded on us. That’s fundamentally incorrect. It was pushed by the richest man in the world, and then yesterday, it was pushed by Donald Trump Jr. Who posted a picture of underwear and a hammer and said it was a Halloween costume for Paul Pelosi.
If we don’t cut this out right now — not just the normalization of violence — but the idea that reality can’t even exist anymore because it cannot catch up to the lies on the Internet. I’m not a scholar on authoritarian history, but I’ve read all of these people. This is how it gets really bad. This is the start of something that gets really, really bad. If you are getting the guardrails off the truth, where it literally cannot catch up to the lies on the Internet because of how the pipe works, how the systems works, because of the incentives of the richest people in the world, then that’s how you lose your democracy.
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