X Purges Charlie Sykes’s Account After Article Critical of Elon Musk

(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Charlie Sykes, the veteran conservative radio host turned leading “Never Trump” figure, had a run-in with the moderators of Elon Musk’s X this week as he was locked out of his account and his recent posts were temporarily purged.

Sykes wrote about X’s punitive measures in his To the Contrary newsletter on Thursday with the subject line, “I’ve Been Kicked Off Twitter (X). And I’m Feeling Fine.” Sykes, one of the co-founders of The Bulwark, detailed the timeline of his expulsion, writing:

As best I can tell, it happened this way: On Tuesday, I got an email from X.

My initial reaction was WTF; but I also vaguely wondered whether it had something with the newsletter I had published the day before: “Elon Musk’s Racist Screed-Storm – by Charlie Sykes”

Yesterday, I got two more emails from the folks at X: The first said that I had violated X’s “copyright” policy and linked to the picture of Musk from Monday’s post. Before I had a chance to respond, I got another missive, telling me that my email had been changed to an obviously phony one, and that I should ‘secure” my account.

“By the time I tried to ‘secure’ the account, I was locked out… and every post from the Trump 2.0 era was erased. I mean, just vanished. So this is what it looks like now, with the latest post dated November 2, 2024 — just days before the election,” Sykes continued while sharing a screenshot of his account reflecting the purge of his posts.

Screenshot via Substack

The article Sykes published on Elon Musk documented the X owner’s “rabid dive into white supremacy,” which he noted “has taken place in broad daylight” but in recent months has largely gone ignored. Americans on both sides of the aisle have indeed become more or less jaded to the antics of Musk, which were also the recent subject of a Washington Post report titled, “Elon Musk’s near-daily online posts about race are turning off some fans.”

Sykes explained he tried to regain control of his account with some 350,000 followers, “but then came to a (very) belated realization: I should have done this a long time ago, when Elon Musk enshittified it. So, I said, in the immortal words of Dr. Johnson, ‘F*ck it.'”

Mediaite reached out to Sykes for any further comment on X’s actions against him, and he reiterated, “I don’t know if I’ve been banned, locked out, or hacked. But at this point, I really don’t care. Because I should’ve quit this hell hole a long time ago.”

Sykes wrote at length about his internal debate about whether or not to exit X earlier and what kept him there until now. “So, I’m not playing the victim card here; or claiming to be a martyr for free expression. This is not a post declaring ‘I AM BEING CENSORED!'” he noted, concluding:

I can’t even say for certain that my erasure from Elon Musk’s site is the result of my (scathing) criticism of the savant idiot’s racism, antisemitism, or nazi-adjacent rhetoric. But since we did not fall off the turnip truck this week, we can draw our own conclusions.

Exit take: It’s probably going to take me a while to get used to this. When I woke up this morning, I instinctively clicked on the Twitter X-app. But when it told me to sod off, I actually felt something I haven’t felt in a while: Relief.

As of Friday afternoon, some of Sykes’s tweets did appear to have been restored, but no new tweets have been posted.

Read Sykes’s full newsletter here.

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