Over the course of just one week in May, Elon Musk posted more than 60 times on X about Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey. The world’s richest man is apparently preoccupied daily by the movie’s casting choices, and he’s ensuring that millions of X users see what he has to say about them.

Musk, who identifies as a Homer fanboy, has claimed his issue is that none of the actors cast in Nolan’s adaptation are Greek. Of course, he only calls out the actors who are Black, Latino, or transgender (meanwhile, the lead actors and the majority of the cast of The Odyssey are white). Musk also praised the 2004 Brad Pitt movie Troy in comparison, even though Pitt and the other actors in that movie aren’t Greek either. They’re just white and cisgender.

Musk’s real issue is with the casting of Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, a character considered the most beautiful woman in the world. Musk objects to the idea that anyone would consider Nyong’o the most beautiful in the world, which is straightforwardly racist. He also objects to the casting of Elliot Page, a trans man, who is rumored to play Achilles (but that’s just speculation). Musk has shared transphobic posts about Page and AI-edited images of Page and Nyong’o to mock them. He also spread a debunked conspiracy about the Oscars’ diversity standards and used it to target gay and Black leaders of the Academy. And he also found the time to lob sexist remarks at the first woman to translate The Iliad and The Odyssey.

It should go without saying that Musk’s racism has catastrophic consequences on millions of lives, especially in the Global South. At the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, Musk was illegally handed control of the federal budget and dissolved USAID, a program that delivered humanitarian aid and medical supplies around the world. Now, more than 9 million people will die unnecessary deaths, including more than 2 million children under 5. Musk also “accidentally” cancelled Ebola prevention efforts, and now the US is “simply choosing not to stop” an outbreak that has killed more than 100 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.

Musk’s racist comments about The Odyssey can’t just be viewed through the lens of an online edgelord identity. It is the same rhetoric driving his global campaign of violent white supremacy, as well as the Trump’s administration “anti-DEI” agenda more broadly.

At the same time, his crusade also can’t be separated from edgelord culture, which is when typically anonymous online commenters incite harassment, rage, and division through edgy and offensive content. Musk’s behavior on X and the way he has frankensteined the platform to champion his bigotry are reminiscent of how 4chan and 8chan users first coordinated harassment campaigns against marginalized women in the 2010s. Now, Musk has turned Twitter into a Gamergate-on-demand machine.

With social media as their weapon of choice, fanboy reactionaries paved the way for Trump’s campaign in 2016. They did it again with anti-MeToo harassment campaigns in time for Trump’s re-election in 2024. A lot of the creators and audiences in this genre have stayed consistent. But Musk has far more power, resources, and influence over society than anyone posting on anonymous forums or making Justice for Johnny Depp videos.

Still, here’s something to consider: Musk is also really unpopular. And now that his reactionary playbook is backed by Trump’s authoritarian power—not to mention, has been recycled a dozen times with different pop culture behemoths—it seems like it’s starting to lose its spark.

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As Gamergate went mainstream, the targets shifted, but the tactics largely stayed the same. Back in 2014, the harassment campaign against women in the video games industry was coordinated on then-niche anonymous forums. Within the next few years, reactionary fanboys would also set their sights on women in the comics industry, Hollywood actresses, and female studio executives. By hitching their conspiratorial, bigoted wagon to Star Wars and Marvel superheroes—pillars of American pop culture—reactionary content creators and their audiences found massive success.

These campaigns all utilize an eerily similar playbook. This includes but is not limited to: making false allegations against women, accusing women of making false allegations, doxxing marginalized creatives and sending them rape and death threats, spreading lies and creating conspiracies about their targets, blaming industry trends and societal woes on “forced” diversity in media, and harassing public figures and journalists who opposed them or reported on their activities.

Through coordinated astroturfing, these oftentimes meager groups can appear as expressions of authentic mass opinion. They work to mass-downvote Reddit posts, mass-dislike YouTube videos (the trailer for The Odyssey is now the most-disliked in Nolan’s career), and artificially sway Rotten Tomatoes scores. In recent years, fearing their backlash, major studios have assembled “superfan focus groups” to determine moments in trailers and elements of posters that could trigger bigoted fans. The result is a further erosion of diversity gains that weren’t even truly equitable or representative to begin with.

There’s an obvious societal impact when these kinds of abuses, biases, and disinformation go viral repeatedly. The impact on the individual people targeted also can’t be understated. Back in 2018, Asian-American Star Wars actress Kelly Marie Tran deleted her Instagram account. She was facing an onslaught of racist abuse and wrote about it for the New York Times:

It’s easy to see the similarities between these campaigns and what Musk is saying about The Odyssey. But with X, Musk can conduct astroturfing at scale. He’s been practicing this since taking over the platform. Musk has changed who is verified, who is amplified, who appears on For You Pages the most, and whose opinions get the most views. He has used this power to his own personal advantage, boosting damaging information against his enemies, and also to boost culture wars that appear to justify the ruling class’ corruption. Musk is sharing posts that claim The Odyssey is the left’s attempt to destroy western civilization, which conveniently shifts the blame from billionaire oligarchs.

Musk has also been stoking a conspiracy that Nolan only cast Nyong’o and Page (who is one of his longtime collaborators) because of the Oscars’ diversity requirements that were implemented in 2020. Musk cursed out the former president of the Academy for “giving” actor, producer, and six-time Academy Governor DeVon Franklin the job of introducing the new standards. But here’s the thing: Every single Best Picture nominee in history already satisfied the diversity requirements. They’re not very stringent. And Nolan won Best Picture with Oppenheimer’s predominantly white cast in 2024. But that didn’t stop racist posters. One who Musk retweeted was Katie Miller, the former DOGE advisor who is married to Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy.

This isn’t a deflection from their bigoted policies so much as it is the pop culture version of them. The Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts are like Gamergate for government.

This is why having a blind spot for pop culture in political coverage and analysis paints an incomplete picture. While fandom “drama” may not seem like a priority compared to undermining Black voting power, systematically purging Black women from federal jobs, and cutting “woke” programs for environmental racism, the fandom stories are often the ones getting the most attention—by design.

Andrew Breitbart infamously said that politics is downstream of culture, and his eponymous conservative outlet pushed Gamergate to its audience in 2014 before driving support for Trump in the following years. Musk has something even better than a conservative news outlet. He can flood the feeds of million of social media users with posts about The Odyssey defiling Greek culture, followed by anti-DEI propaganda posted by the Trump administration’s official accounts. It’s all part of the same funnel into racist extremism and the ultimate example of manufacturing consent.

Musk is far from the only person melting down over The Odyssey’s casting. You can find the usual suspects who profited from Gamergate, Depp v. Heard, and other reactionary fan backlashes making new content about this. Many of them are full-time creators who need new material to feed the beast. But I also found something refreshing while searching different platforms: viral posts defending Nolan, The Odyssey, and its cast. Many of them were outperforming the hate campaign.

“Mythology has never and will never be set in stone,” said one queer creator in a video response to the backlash that has more than 2.6 million views on Instagram. “Our modern perception of Greek mythology as we know it are snapshots of a living story that has existed for thousands upon thousands of years, the origins of we will never know. And it’s almost like the idea of what is masculinity changes over time.”

This creator, whose name isn’t listed in their profile, defended Page’s rumored casting as Achilles in part because the character of Achilles isn’t the male chauvinist Musk and his fanboys think he is. The queer creator spilled real knowledge about Greek mythology that many of these so-called Homer superfans don’t even know. It’s a dynamic that reflects so many of these harassment campaigns. They seek to push women, people of color, and LGBTQ people out of the fandom spaces that marginalized people often built and maintained. But people like Musk are obsessed with their own superiority, asserting that they are the true fans and anyone who isn’t a straight cis white man is an intruder in their space.

That mentality was especially pervasive when it came to white men and video games, superheroes, and Star Wars. One of the reasons these campaigns have been successful in the past is because they manipulate bystanders into joining mobs and pile-ons under the guise of being righteous. Gamergate pretended to be about “ethics in video game journalism.” The Star Wars sequels were genuinely disappointing, and blaming women and minorities for the failure was a convenient narrative.

But The Odyssey isn’t even out until July, and Nolan has built up a lot of audience goodwill (separate from everything mentioned here, I’m kind of a Nolan hater, but objectively he makes very impressive movies). He doesn’t usually make a billion dollars at the box office, but he makes up for it in critical acclaim. The Odyssey will probably be a good movie, and haters inventing reasons to hate out of thin air will be obvious. Also, it’s already obvious that Musk and his white supremacist friends on X are phoning in their appreciation for the classics. One of them was just widely mocked for using AI to generate a realistic-looking version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, while Musk intermittently shares Grok-generated AI images of young, sexy anime women in fantasy settings in between complaining about Greek representation.

Odysseus and Penelope don’t have the same hold over the American psyche that Luke Skywalker and Spider-Man do, but aside from that, more people are also catching on to this playbook that gets recycled every few business days on X and in the edgiest corners of the internet. There’s still a lot of work to be done to address the impact of these harassment campaigns, but it seems like complaining about woke casting choices isn’t hitting the same way under Trump 2.0. Maybe the difference lies in the fact that it’s no longer societal outcasts leading the charge—it’s the world’s wealthiest and most pathetic man.