Elon is at it again.
So I needed to talk to Susan J. Demas.
She reported Musk’s assault on reason and decency in real time, and you can still hear how pissed it makes her.
I didn’t need her to confirm what happened in Dearborn in 2024, but to understand, as much as possible, how it felt in real time. Because I believe one of my callings is to explain to anyone who will listen that Elon Musk is doing now, in 2026, what he did in 2024, but worse. However, my biggest problem is that I don’t think many people have any idea what he did then, how intense his disinformation campaign was, and how much room there is to improve it now that he’s had years to tune X into a behavior manipulation machine along with the developments in AI that could be used to microtarget voters to hit them with messages that move votes, wherever they look or click.
The definitive piece on Elon’s contrived mayhem came out just after Trump won some twenty-two months ago. The Washington Post reconstructed the broad outlines of the $45 million operation that targeted Muslim voters with pro-Kamala Harris mailers and Jewish voters with the exact opposite message, giving Muslim voters what seemed to be Harris’s pro-Israel ads and vice versa, with the point being not only to sway votes but also to generally enrage voters.
The story has never truly been told in full because the press is generally unwilling or unable to do so. To them, Musk will always be an unconventional businessman/genius/inventor first. That was even the story Walter Isaacson told in real-time back in 2024, ignoring that he was watching the descent into depravity of a man who would celebrate Trump’s wins by making a speech to German fascists and throwing up a pair of Sieg Heils. To them, Musk is never the guy who bought the presidency the first time it became legal to do so, then took it on a joyride to being a billionaire while sentencing up to 14 million people to death as part of his Apartheid redemption agenda.
They can’t even get the basics right, as Michael T. Sweeney notes:
We have to recognize that the mainstream press will never force Republicans to answer for Musk’s actual atrocities, as Kevin M. Kruse notes, the way they force every Democrat to own the shitposts of a Twitch streamer.
Why?
I’d just add the insights I gained from Evan Sutton, AKA EvanYellsatClouds, and one of the force multipliers behind the #TeslaTakedown: Musk skates between the raindrops for two simple reasons. The press loves to believe him. He said he was leaving politics after protesters helped force him out of DOGE, and he ignited the Epstein Files scandal on the way out, so they believed him, despite his feed being a never-ending cesspool of white supremacist garble. And Democratic politicians remain wary of taking him on directly, having generally refused to participate in the Takedowns and, overall, hesitating to make accountability for DOGE one of the big issues of 2026.
But that’s why you need a Susan J. Demas, almost the definition of an old-school journalist who has learned to thrive in a digital world.
She built Michigan Advance from nothing into the template for how democracy-loving publications like Heartland Signal and The Gander cover the Midwest. Susan then went national as CEO and executive editor of Lincoln Square, where Stuart Stevens, Rick Wilson and Joe Trippi tell her what a campaign looks like from the inside of the brains of anti-Trump Republicans who actually think votes should count. In 2024, she’d already spent months covering the real, unmanufactured grief in Dearborn over Gaza before Elon Musk’s operatives arrived to turn it into a dark-money testing ground.
She kindly offered these four examples of the mailings she reported on in real time, which I share now to fuel the confusion and to warn us all about how our brains and votes are about to be messed with by a man who sees us all as an incidental backdrop to the story of his exploiting the public good for his private spoils.
Every stage of what Musk built runs on the same exploit. People mostly don’t update their political views in response to arguments. They update from what they perceive the room already believes, and a room with no fixed consensus doesn’t stay empty for long. Whoever fills it first, with whatever they want to believe, wins it, and a mailbox is just a slower, cheaper version of the algorithm doing the same job at platform scale.
Steve Bannon’s own name for the tactic, flooding the zone, describes the delivery system. What actually gets delivered is the sensation that everyone else has already decided, so you might as well decide too, in whichever direction keeps you home.
A campaign built to make you doubt whether anyone can tell true from false doesn’t need you to believe anything in particular. It only needs you exhausted enough to stop checking. That tactic worked incredibly well, as Musk propped Trump up against a candidate running against an unpopular incumbent. Trump is now that even more unpopular incumbent. So his tactics will have to be even more divisive, targeted, and unethical, if not illegal.
I also talked to Susan about what Lincoln Square is building against that, what she’s watching for as Musk’s operation reactivates around Michigan’s open Senate race and Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign specifically, and why the antidote is never going to be a sharper fact-check. It’s a story that tells you the truth in a way that spreads through the zone of shit. That’s what Susan J. Demas works on every day.
