Back in 1996 Mark Knopfler released a song on his Golden Heart album called “Cannibals,” a song with a wonderful New Orleans flavor. It has a little lyrical phrase:

Once upon a time there were cannibals
Now there are no cannibals anymore

For some reason this lyric invoked a response with me of, “Well you can’t say that about Nazis.” Though well and thoroughly beaten and reviled by a majority of Mankind since World War II, these “human” cockroaches are still crawling out of the wood work. But now, when you turn the light on, rather than scurrying for the cracks in the baseboards, they are standing up and flipping us off.

And of course this leads us right to Twitter and Elon’s descent into “free speech for everybody,” including those who preach genocide as their favored past time.

After banning Ye, for his anti-Semitic posting to Twitter, Elon turned around and allowed Andrew Anglin back onto the platform. Anglin is a full-blown unapologetic Nazi criminal who has a warrant out for his arrest in Montana.

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the arrest of a neo-Nazi website publisher accused of ignoring a $14 million judgment against him for orchestrating an anti-Semitic harassment campaign against a Montana woman’s family.

Anglin’s case is just one tiny example of the simple fact that hate speech precedes hateful actions and violence. One could state this as a too-obvious rule: Hate speech precedes and encourages hate crimes.

We can now fully wipe away the assumption that a guy as brilliant with the mathematics and engineering of material sciences has any clue about humanity. Frankly, that’s been a problem for Mankind throughout the entire “machine age,” which we still happen to be in. Industrialists put their faith in machines and the laws of matter rather than in people—completely oblivious to the fact that people matter, not the machines.

Nazis and their forebears, psychiatry and the pseudo-science of eugenics, tried to treat men as material objects to be used and discarded according to their whims. They thought populations could be controlled by the proliferation of lies and hammering those lies until they became truth—which of course can never really be done. Nazis, white supremacists and the like also don’t learn well. As their generations have proceeded through the decades—their lessons of hate and imagined superiority are whispered to their children.

Of course populations can be manipulated by lies—temporarily. Those of warped and evil minds do so to take attention from their own insanity and criminality and create an enemy that must be fought immediately. This became the story of every genocide in Man’s bloody history, not just Nazi Germany, but the genocide of the native tribes of our continent, the American salve-holding South, the Aboriginal genocide in Australia, the Moriori genocide in New Zealand, Apartheid in South Aftrica, Stalin’s purges, Rawanda, Bosnia, Armenia, you name it. The rhetoric is always the same.

And now we have Elon opening the sluice gates of this kind of hate speech again with his frankly idiotic ideas of fully equal free speech. Musk claims to be following the laws of whatever countries Twitter is in with regard to content moderation. To this one can say, “bullshit.” Not all speech is protected under the First Amendment—no matter what right-wing pseudo activists want us to believe.

As Musk’s grand miscalculation and mismanagement of Twitter continues, a few things will continue to happen. First the platform will take on more and more of the aspect of hate-speech, racist havens like Gab, Parler and Telegram—and people who wish to retain their humanity will set up accounts with other platforms that have at least a clue like post.news. Indeed, other platform are sprouting up at an increasing rate. Even Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder, is getting ready to enter the fray again with Bluesky Social. Twitter meanwhile will continue to lose money through the loss of advertisers who want no part of turning back the clock on the human race.

Musk’s timing is also really bad for his real flagship brand, Tesla. Telsa stock has lost a third of its value in the last month and he’s being sued by shareholders for being vastly overpaid. Thus the richest man in the world might not qualify for that title for long.

The long and short of Elon’s problems lie in his people skills—the apparent total lack thereof. Why else would he allow lowlifes like Anglin and Trump back onto the platform to spew their hatred. Sure Trump hasn’t done so yet, but give it time. He hasn’t fully destroyed Truth.social yet. But when they fail to pay their bills and the lights go out on their servers, he’ll come scuttling back.

How to counter the presence of Nazis? A town in Germany had a great idea of using an annual Nazi march as a fundraising tool for an anti-Nazi organization. Musician Daryl Davis goes one-on-one befriending KKK members and getting them to leave the Klan—there is no discernible difference in philosophy between the KKK and Nazis. Heineken did a great commercial about people with wildly opposing viewpoints and opinions overcoming these differences—sure beer was involved, but the video was about much more than that.

The best solution is always live and direct communication between individuals. The lessons that Daryl Davis teaches are particularly important because they are based on the fact that all people are basically good.

Haters like Steve Bannon, Andrew Aglin, Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller, Alex Jones, Trump and others of their ilk are actually a tiny little terrified minority. The most effective thing we can all do to crush the spirits of these little creeps is to literally ignore them and move on with our lives, prosper and leave them in the rear view festering in their own miserable hate and terror-filled lives.

But never fail to speak out when you see it. As President Biden posted on Twitter, “Silence is complicity.”