In March of last year, I wrote an article in which I lamented that David Icke was right. It’s been almost a year, and that headline – indeed the very idea of writing that down and then attaching my name to it – was difficult. However, skepticism means facing down uncomfortable truths, and admitting things that we may not want to admit but the evidence points us there. I had to admit that Icke had made a good point.
I’ll explain. It’s not that Icke is right about anything in his conspiratorial worldview. However, Icke was right to lambaste the people in what he called the “Mainstream Alternative Media” (MAM). This is the group that includes, according to him: Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Jordan Peterson. They have each built a public persona as someone who is “fighting the system,” “being a rebel,” and looking out for the common person. While the people within the group have had their share of in-fighting over the years, they’ve always been fighting about the little details. Carlson, for example, hadn’t partook in alien conspiracy theories for most of his career, while Alex Jones believes that alien invasions are happening and that he’s fighting the actual Christian Devil. But these are minor differences, ignoring those, they’ve all been on the same side. That is, until recently, when Icke noticed that this group of supposed rebels have begun worshipping at the altar of Elon Musk.
Icke’s position is that this is absurd. While all of them have worldviews based on fictional sources, a poor understanding of economics, and thinly veiled white nationalism; they apparently fail to recognise a true enemy when they see it. Musk, Icke explained, had not done anything to prove his worth, other than buying Twitter and reinstating their previously banned accounts. He’s clearly part of “the system.” Icke reasons, in an incredible broken clock moment, that if the conspiracy worldview was true, someone like Musk would not be allowed to succeed. His purchase of the platform would not have been allowed to go through. Further, Icke says Musk is exactly the type of person that the whole lot of them have been warning the world about: an obscenely rich technocrat that literally has a business which puts computer chips in people’s brains. Every caricature that they developed about someone like Bill Gates actually applies to Elon Musk. Icke isn’t actually correct, because there is no “they.” There are no lizard-aliens, Illuminati, Globalists, or International Jewish Cabal. There are only two options: either Icke and the entire Mainstream Alternative Media are wrong, or Musk is a tool of the system.
That was back in March. Since then, Musk spent his time cozying up to then-candidate Trump, and probably tipping some votes in his direction. Musk has ingrained himself into the new administration, and in doing so he’s been attempting to influence policy. His policy decisions have created a greater schism in the conspiracy theory world, and it has been revealed to the true believers that they have been duped.
The breaking point came over the issue of H1-B Visas. Under US immigration law, an H1-B Visa is a specialty Visa that allows an individual to come to the United States to work in a particular field. The person is considered a “non-immigrant worker.” Under the law, this means that the person has no intention of becoming a citizen and is only in the US for professional reasons. After a period of three years (with a possible extension to six) they are supposed to return to their country of origin. I will not speculate on the intention of the programme, only to say that my country’s immigration system needs some kind of overhaul, because the H1-B Visa programme can lead to abuse.
For example, let’s say that you own a social media company. You could extend an offer to citizens in a country with a lower economic system, so that they come to the US and work. You can pay them lower wages than citizen workers, and then after the three years are up, the workers can be sent back home. In the late 18th and 19th century we called a programme like this “indentured servitude.” Poor Irish people, for example, fleeing the extreme poverty of their own country, would enthral themselves to wealthier individuals to gain passage to the United States. After a period, that individual would be “released”.
However, the rift is not actually over the unfairness of this for those workers. The rift is in the Trump/Musk endorsement of the H1-B programme in general. The conspiratorial side, the true believers, saw this as a stark betrayal of an important reason that they supported Trump to begin with: he is supposed to protect their border. He spent the entire campaign, and one disaster of a debate (which ultimately didn’t matter), spewing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Both of his campaigns for president have been based on protecting the United States from the immigrant hordes, and now he’s telling the public that he’s in support of bringing people into the United States to work.
To be clear: I’m not endorsing either side of this fight. For me it’s clearly an “Alien versus Predator” situation, where I’m just sitting back and watching the carnage.
Trump and Musk’s endorsement of the visa programme angered true believers like Laura Loomer. Loomer is a name familiar to those of us who follow conspiracy theorists, but also to those who follow political campaigns as she was a guest and advisor to then-candidate Trump over the summer. Loomer aired her grievances on social media, alongside other high profile conspiracy theorists like Steve Bannon and InfoWars second chair Owen Schroyer.
This could have just been a minor policy disagreement. During the first Trump presidency, conservative pundits criticised the president for not being strong enough on the immigration issue, but they were never overly hostile about it. However, the problem escalated, because suddenly the critics of Trump’s position began losing their check marks on Musk’s platform, and accounts were suspended.
The conclusion that people like Loomer and Schroyer reached was that they were being censored by the “free-speech absolutist”. Musk, it should be noted, has never been a free-speech absolutist. The first thing he did after taking over Twitter was banning an account which tracked his private jet. Then he labelled news agencies that he didn’t agree with as “government propaganda.”
The explanation for Loomer’s account was that other platforms have blocked her, and the Twitter algorithm automatically blocks accounts. That is a very weak and obviously incorrect statement. If it were true, people like Alex Jones, Owen Schroyer, and Laura Loomer would never have been reinstated. I can’t say with definitive proof that Musk banned their accounts, but I can say that the situation surely points in that direction.
The schism shows us the difference between the believers and the opportunists. In the conspiracy world, immigrants are nothing more than tools brought in to cause terrorism, turn the kids gay, and vote Democrat. People like Alex Jones have been screaming this for the entirety of the Obama and Biden administrations; people like them are a major reason that immigration is even an issue in the presidential elections. It’s not that this should be a deal-breaker for these people, it should be the deal-breaker. The fight likely explains the horrid immigration policies that are going forward now in the United States. They were bad during the first Trump administration, but there is a new vigour by which people not deemed “real Americans” are being hounded, and those with questionable citizenship are being arrested and forcibly exiled. My assumption is that this fight is likely a contributing factor to Musk’s new habit of offering Nazi salutes (twice at the Presidential Inauguration) and endorsing the extremist positions of the German AFD Party.
