X vs BSkyB: leaving one cesspool for another

By Rod Dreher
It was disappointing, but entirely predictable, that the Diocese of Norwich (and other C of E dioceses) would abandon X.
Elon Musk and his social media platform have become the cynosure for establishment liberals to focus their distaste, even hatred, for people and cultural forces they find objectionable. This is virtue-signalling, straight up.
Bishop Graham Usher said in his departure announcement that he has “grown more uncomfortable that X seeks to divide more than to build up, sink people rather than let them fly.” He has chosen to relocate to the explicitly liberal version of X, called BlueSky.
If the good bishop has gone to BlueSky seeking upbuilding discourse, he will have been sorely disappointed. BlueSky is like X: some good stuff, some not-great stuff, and some abhorrent material.
To take one example, a Bluesky user posted an image of a woman with a bearded man’s severed head on a platter with the slogan printed at the bottom, “Woman must serve man.” Who knows, maybe Bishop Usher enjoys the possibility that this is a Biblical scene featuring Salome and St. John the Baptist?
The same user retweeted a post by BlueSky user “GodlessBitch.Bsky.social” saying, “Whenever there is a disaster, Republicans are quick to point fingers, but slow to lend a hand.” Which, fine, whatever. But please, Your Grace, spare us the claim that you are moving to BlueSky seeking unifying, positive exchanges. And it is interesting to speculate what kind of eirenic exchanges you might have with ‘Godless Bitch’.
Bishop Usher has been on X for almost as long as I have (11 years for him, 13 years for me). He surely knows that X, in its former incarnation as Twitter, was both a cesspool and a gold mine. The same garbage one sees on BlueSky has also been present on Twitter from the beginning, when it was run by left-wingers. It’s still there under Musk’s administration, alas, but Musk has also been less censorious of right-wing political opinion. Almost every single day I suffer appalling abuse from left-wing X users, as I have since I first joined the platform in 2011, but I have never left Twitter/X because the good far outweighs the bad.
What is that good? On X, I get information that I don’t get anywhere else. The accounts I choose to follow – including liberal Xers – curate stories and advance stories that the establishment media either downplay or ignore entirely. In my own writing and commentary, I read the daily newspapers, but I also read X, to stay informed.
As a professional journalist, I am all too aware, from personal experience, how ideologically blinkered establishment media are. There are many good journalists, but generally speaking, the media herd are more interested in managing the approved narrative than reporting the truth.
Where would Britain be today without Elon Musk taking the lead on the Pakistani Muslim rape gang scandal? The news has been known for a long time, but it took Musk’s interest in the hideous story, and promoting it on his personal X account, to goose public awareness and interest. The story reveals the utter moral bankruptcy of the British establishment, of both the left and the right, who threw these working-class English girls and their families to the wolves to protect the sacred left-liberal and right-liberal shibboleth of multiculturalism.
As someone who wrote extensively about the US Catholic sex abuse scandal in the early 2000s, and who ultimately lost my Catholic faith over it, I saw firsthand how establishment journalists in the recent past knew far more than they reported about the abuse of children by Catholic clerics. But they were the gatekeepers of information, so the public remained in the dark.
I also saw how writers on the Internet blew the 2002 Boston story sky-high, and turned it into a major national event. Outsiders on the Internet made it possible for establishment journalists across America to know in far greater detail what was happening in Boston, and to dig into the same cover-ups locally. These were pre-Twitter days, of course, but it is almost certainly true that without the Internet, the Catholic abuse scandal would still be largely a secret.
A similar thing is happening with Musk and X. As an American who has lived in Europe for the last three years, it has shocked me to see how different conditions are in real life here, with regard to Islamic radicalism and migrant crime, to what one reads about in the established papers, or hears and sees on the broadcast networks. The left-liberal media in the Anglosphere still play their familiar role as guardians of the ‘narrative’, and fail comprehensively to inform their publics what is actually happening.
Then came Elon Musk to interview the media outcast Alice Weidel, leader of Germany’s so-called “far right” party, Alternative for Germany – and the heads of good liberals (some of them mitred) exploded. Weidel came across not as Eva Braun in a pants suit, but as the soul of common sense.
Musk’s chatty conversationalism was not a model of journalism, to be sure – he ought to have asked more policy questions – but the importance of his interview was to thumb his nose at the media boycott of Weidel. There is a good reason that her party is now the second most popular in Germany, and despite what the mainstream media would have us believe, it’s not because the German people are crypto-Nazis.
Bishop Usher and other churchmen are certainly free to go wherever their conscience leads them on their social media presence, but let’s be honest. Leaving X for BlueSky, and the companionship of folks like Goddess Bitch, is not an act of civic virtue, but a gesture of conformism through which a prelate telegraphs that he is the Right Sort Of Person, which is to say, not one who grubs his prayerful hands through condescending to mix with the great unwashed and their opinions unpopular in the salons of respectable persons.
There is a lot of that sort of thing in the English establishment these days. Why, I learned about it on X.
Rod Dreher (@roddreher on X) is a writer who lives in Budapest. His most recent book is “Living In Wonder” (Hodder Faith, 2024)