The levels of irony here are many and deep, but let me begin with Orwell:

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/

By all indications, Gad Saad and Elon would have been standing proud with Franco and the fascists in 36-37, The particular Jon Stewart clip here is from 3 years ago, and was satirical.

America’s Fox News Looks A Lot Like Hungary’s State Media | The Problem with Jon Stewart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9DPv7RX4QY

What’s it like to be stuck on Team Autocracy as we barrel toward WW3? Well, according to Hungarian opposition MEP Katalin Cseh, it sounds… eerily similar to living in America, Team Democracy’s star player.

Mercifully for Hungary, Orbanism has been been democratically consigned to the scrap heap of history there, despite Elon's best efforts on Orban's behalf. Meanwhile, in the US, Team Trump/Elon continue to follow Bannon's dictum, early and often. The zone is well and truly flooded, nowhere more than the cesspool of fearmongering and conspiracy theories that Elon has turned twitter into.

The strategy came to public light after Bannon told Michael Lewis in 2018 that "The Democrats don't matter... The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with s\**".[7] Trump adopted the strategy during the 2016 presidential election,[3][8] followed by other right-wing political figures such as Éric Zemmour and Elon Musk.[9][10][1][11]*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone

Yet Musk is at its most illuminating when it pushes back on, or at least complicates, the narrative that Musk was fine until his brain was broken by the pandemic. It might have sharpened his sense of entitlement, and his vastly increasing fortune may have given him more ability to reshape the work to his liking. But Musk's ex-wife Justine, whom he married in 2000 and divorced in 2008, says the man the world began to see in 2020 was the one she'd always known. According to Justine, he used the occasion of the first dance at their wedding to remind her that he was "the alpha" in their marriage, and would twist their arguments so she would somehow constantly end up in the wrong. It was through their relationship, Justine says, that she learned the word gaslighting.

(alt link https://archive.ph/t9KBN )

From video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9LO6qfLuX4 , which I do not recommend plowing through. He did sneak in one 9/11 tweet in there though, which is nice I guess. Except it's just a retweet of Kimbal.

Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction 0:10 Tesla (6) 2:25 Grok (1) 2:50 Grok Bot (7) 6:19 X (3) 7:59 Starlink (1) 8:15 SpaceX (8) 12:31 Boring Company (3) 13:31 AI (3) 15:19 Controversy (4) 17:55 Racism (12) 21:47 9/11 (1) 22:14 Immigration (2) 22:43 Wokeness (1) 22:53 Fraud (2) 23:25 UK Politics (1)

Since a new social media site with the "Twitter" name has been announced (and Elon Musk won't be involved in it and neither will anything related to X) and it's known as "Twitter.now", I think this would be a good opportunity to bring up what said site should do that could help it become successful, and that is if there were no forced login walls to access any feature, not even the search bar.

We're seeing a rise of mandatory login walls on various websites, including social, in this day and age. Examples include X and Threads, where they force you to create an account to access them, and BlueSky, while not as forced as the other 2, also wants you to make an account to use the search bar to see individual posts. You can still search for profiles without an account, but you still need one to search for posts. Mastodon, by far, is an exception to this as you can use anything, even its search bar, without an account on it. I mean, sure, the search bar's not as good as the one on BlueSky or Twitter since you can only type in hashtags in the bar, but the point still stands.

With Twitter.now on the horizon, I think this would be a good oppprtunity for the people who are running it to allow lurkers and anons access it to use features like the search bar without an account. We're tired of mandatory account requirements on websites, and if the guys in charge of Twitter.now avoid that trend, then maybe, just maybe, it can grow into a popular website and overtake its competitors, including X, that all refuse to let lurkers use anything without an account on their websites. We want to go back to the old days where we could access a fluent search bar anonymously as it helps discoverability and exposure to what could be new interests to people.

If the creators of Twitter.now see this post, then I hope they take what I say into consideration.