I didn’t think it was possible for John Gruber to exude even more tone-deaf privilege, but I have been proven wrong in spectacular fashion. Reading from his ‘X Once Again Marks the Spot’ piece published this past Sunday:

The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place. That cheerfulness is another differentiator. If you believe the world is falling apart and doomed only to get worse, that our obvious and real problems cannot be surmounted, X is not the platform for you. If you think the world is full of fun and amazing people and things, that humanity’s defining feature is our collective ability to solve any problem, that the only time better to be alive than today is tomorrow, it might be.

If you have stayed away, or even just mostly away, from X for years and then come back, people just say things like “Hey, glad you’re back!” On the other networks, especially Mastodon, they tell you you’re “feeding Nazis”≉by going to the platform where Tim Cook posts Pikachu videos. These people have either lost their minds or refuse to check their prior assumptions. (Most of the ones who chime in about it publicly are the lost-their-minds types.)

Well, thank God the rich, old, white guy can report back that the platform is a safe, inviting place. There are a countless number of things wrong with those statements, and it is beyond ignorant to claim that people who disagree with your stance on the subject have “lost their minds.” There has been a flood of online commentary nearly universally lambasting the idea that returning to X is anything less than morally reprehensible. In response to Gruber’s article, Lex Friedman published a damning (though obviously abbreviated) list of receipts that serves as a friendly reminder of just how terrible Musk is.

It was recently reported that Musk is the largest political donor in the U.S. midterms. John Gruber, Marco Arment, and the team at MacStories have not only returned to X, but they are also verified blue checks because they are paying for X Premium. There exists no clearer way of proving you are content with funding this attack on our democracy, and that your prior moral high ground was simply performative social justice warrior bullshit.