Shawn Vestal: Yes, Elon, the Patriot Front was unmasked in Coeur d’Alene

The man hailed as the savior of free speech, who pledged to create the “most accurate source of information in the world,” has stepped in it again – a big, soft pile of very free, very dumb, very wrong speech.

This time, Elon Musk was wrong about something that scads of people in the Inland Northwest saw with their own eyes: the unmasking of the 31 Patriot Front members who converged on Coeur d’Alene with plans to riot at a Pride event in June 2022.

Two days ago, an account on what we still call Twitter was pushing a new chapter of an old story, now common among MAGA-lytes and far-right extremists. In this story, the violent, hateful actions of the extreme right are actually the work of dastardly, undercover federal agents.

This narrative that the feds, posing as far-right wackos, are to blame for the things done by far-right wackos has become a cut-and-paste alternative reality – blamed for everything from Jan. 6 to Proud Boy skirmishes in Portland.

Over the weekend, a slice of this nutcake was served up regarding a march in Manhattan of some 100 masked members of the white supremacist Patriot Front. An account holder whose posts are about evenly split between conspiracies about COVID-19 and conspiracies about the FBI claiming that the Manhattan march was a false flag operation made up of undercover feds. To “support” this claim, he used a photo from The Spokesman-Review showing masked Patriot Front members being arrested in Coeur d’Alene.

“Fed front,” the man wrote. “How many times have you seen a group of masked men dressed exactly the same, handcuffed with not one mask pulled off to reveal their identity? This is aimed at gullible libtards who want to believe these are ‘white nationalists’ (because) it affirms their worldview and it’s an election year.”

To which Musk replied: “This does seem odd. Why no mask removal after arrest?”

By midday Monday, well over half a million people had seen Musk’s post (though some significant number of them were gullible liberals correcting the record).

Mark it as Exhibit No. 1,423,659 in the Conspiracy of Online Dunces.

The 31 men arrested in Coeur d’Alene were unmasked and identified. On the day of their arrest, observers and bystanders watched police take each masked, handcuffed patriot and unmask them as they prepared to take them to jail. Videos posted online – on Twitter, naturally – showed mask after mask coming off the suspects. One journalist and author who covered the event, David Neiwert, wrote Monday on the platform: “Every single one of them had their mask removed in full view.”

He posted a thread of photographs taken during the arrests to back it up.

All 31 booking photos were published prominently in the local and national media. Several of the men have appeared in court, maskless, identified by name, age and city of residence, and some have spoken publicly and not a single one – so far as I can ascertain – has claimed that the feds were involved. Five were convicted at trial of conspiracy to riot and sentenced to a few days in jail; all but two of the others have pleaded guilty to reduced charges.

There was a whole lot that was “odd” about that event, from the hostility whipped up by North Idaho hate-mongers beforehand to the Apple-Dumpling-Gang-level of criminal competence demonstrated by the Frontsters.

But it was not “odd” that the masks were not removed.

Because the masks were unequivocally, absolutely not not removed.

A “community note” – a kind of fact check – was attached to Musk’s comment on the website now known as X. It was not the first time his own tweets were flagged by the fact-checking apparatus on his own platform. And it was far from the first time he has elevated and seemingly agreed with bigoted extremists; most notably, he responded to a post last year claiming that Jewish people “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”

Musk replied: “You have said the actual truth.”

It may seem as if a couple of moronic tweets doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But what’s happening on the platform, and in our nation’s information ecosystem overall, is not a matter of a couple of moronic tweets. It’s a deluge of lies, of mis- and disinformation, of opportunistic falsehoods and politicized mendacity – a devil’s compact between liars and fools that has seeped into every corner of our public life.

If your only response to it is to note that liars and fools have free-speech rights – which they obviously do – then you are the wind beneath their wings.

The Patriot Front is real and its influence malign. What Musk has done with Twitter is create a very friendly home for those who support them and think the FBI is the enemy of the nation.

His takeover of Twitter was celebrated as a new dawn of free speech by conservatives, who viewed themselves as victims of fact-checkers and content moderators.

And it came to pass in an ugly way: The appearance of racial slurs and bigoted language skyrocketed (as tracked by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and others) and thousands of accounts that had been banned for violating the platform’s terms of service – including explicitly white supremacist accounts – were reinstated.

Musk himself repeatedly elevated some truly ugly posts, often with a “just asking questions” framework, as if he were merely a disinterested contrarian engaged in discovering the hidden truth via tweeting with the dregs of his website.

But what happened in Coeur d’Alene was not some thought experiment for people role-playing in reality. It was not “The Matrix” in action.

It was an actual series of events, witnessed by people who were there, documented by journalists and observers, carried out by members of law enforcement and the justice system, litigated by attorneys and handled in open court.

Reality, in other words. Not so odd at all.