My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:
“Build or Die is destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center
“This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument
“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.”—Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
If you are still posting on X, you should stop today. Quitting the site yesterday would have been better, but doing it today is better than doing it tomorrow.
The moral and political case for quitting X is so obvious that it scarcely bears repeating, but I’ll briefly recap it anyway. The guy who owns X—the person to whom you are personally donating if you pay for a blue checkmark—is Elon Musk, an out and out white supremacist who uses X to spread Nazi ideas like Great Replacement theory. He is a major backer, in both money and propaganda, of the global far right. During his brief tenure inside Trump’s Administration, he spearheaded the destruction of USAID, which, according to recent estimates, may result in 14 million deaths between 2025 and 2030.
X is the platform this particular mass murderer uses to seed his most poisonous ideas. A couple of months ago, he used the platform to egg on the Belfast pogrom. Those who continue to post on X—in particular those X users who are not racist psychopaths—are enhancing the site’s usefulness to him as a propaganda tool by drawing more eyes to the platform and making it look like an ideologically diverse “marketplace of ideas” instead of what it is: a delivery vehicle for bringing fascism into the mainstream of global politics. Oh, and perhaps the Internet’s leading destination for those in search of child sexual abuse material.
Some non-fascist X users have acknowledged all of this and argued that, nonetheless, progressives must remain on the platform to fight the propaganda machine from within. I think that represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how the platform operates. The token Democrat on Fox News (these days, the main one is Jessica Tarlov) is not there to undermine the network’s political objectives. She’s there as a useful foil and to make Fox News appear (marginally) more credible as a balanced debate platform. Similarly, prominent progressives on X are reinforcing the network effects that give the site its power. Consider this: Musk’s meddling in the site’s algorithm to suppress certain kinds of posts and elevate others is well documented. So if your anti-fascist posts on X are still getting views, it’s either because these posts are so toothless as to escape Musk’s notice, or because they are in fact useful to him.
Like I said, that’s the moral and political case. I don’t expect it to persuade anyone who isn’t already persuaded. But if you’re a writer, journalist, or political figure, here’s another very good reason why you should drop X: self-interest.
If your job has anything to do with politics or the news media, then you probably consider seeing the world clearly to be an important professional asset. You need a decent sense of the shifting political winds: changes in public and elite opinion, windows of political opportunity that are opening or shutting, and so on. If you’re a political journalist and you don’t have a nose for these things, then you’ll always be either playing catch-up with your savvier colleagues or making calls that will embarrass you later. And if you’re an advocate or politico, then the professional consequences of making a bad call can be even more severe.
The temptation to use Twitter as a mirror of the political world has always been high, and it has led plenty of people astray in the past. That’s the reason why “Twitter isn’t real life” became something of a cliché back in the old days: some reporters would see a particular idea or story catch fire on Twitter and mistakenly assume that it must therefore be genuinely important, or some ambitious politician or policy entrepreneur would begin speaking in a language that was incomprehensible to those who weren’t extremely online. Touching grass, to resurface another old Twitter cliché, has always been good policy.
But the risks are even bigger now that Elon Musk is bending the site formerly known as Twitter to his own political ends. He is deliberately building an immersive environment where far-right extremism is not only present but omnipresent. “Normalize” is another word that became yet another online cliché during the first Trump Administration, but there is no better word for what Musk is trying to do: he is using X to make Nazism appear normal to habitual X users.
That does not mean that everyone who uses X is going to get brainwashed into becoming a Nazi. But propaganda can work on you in subtler ways as well. It can insinuate extreme ideas into the texture of your everyday life. It can create a whole dreamscape for you to sleepwalk through. And the more time you spend in that dreamscape, the greater the odds that it will influence your real-world thinking and decision-making in ways that you will come to regret later.
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but my argument didn’t quite click for me until I read this Unpopular Front post from John Ganz. In the post, Ganz cites a 2025 Henry Farrell essay on “malformed publics,” or what I called the dreamscape of X:
Something like this explains the main consequences of social media for politics. The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.
This isn’t brainwashing - people don’t have to internalize this or that aspect of what social media presents to them, radically changing their beliefs and their sense of who they are. That sometimes happens, but likely far more rarely than we think. The more important change is to our beliefs about what other people think, which we perpetually update based on social observation. When what we observe is filtered through social media, our understandings of the coalitions we belong to, and the coalitions we oppose, what we have in common, and what we disagree on, shift too.
I would go one step further than Farrell. It’s not only that these platforms distort our perception of what other people believe. It’s that they alter our notion of how normal public discourse is conducted. They embed us in a certain type of emotional, affective reality that over time comes to influence our own affect.
I’m speaking from personal experience. My first job out of college was as a researcher for Media Matters for America, where my job mainly involved watching at least six hours of Fox News every day. Watching Fox News did not make me more conservative; quite the opposite. But it did affect me. The visual language and rhythms of Fox News burrowed into my subconscious. I found that I was becoming antsier, crankier, more paranoid, and more short-tempered when it came to handling disagreement. I was internalizing the Fox News affect even as I was consciously drifting further left in order to concretize my rejection of Fox News ideology. It was impossible not to see politics through a frame that Fox News set for me. On at least one occasion, I had a dream that consisted entirely of sitting at my desk in the Media Matters office, watching an episode of The O’Reilly Factor.
Ganz writes that he has “seen people change with their algorithms and it’s pretty scary and sad.” I can second that. One example that leaps to mind is Noah Smith, an liberal economist frequent commentator on current events. Back in 2021, before Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, he was mostly writing about economic policy, although he would also drop the occasional lukewarm take on politics, such as in this post observing that the George Floyd protests were peaceful and not the first strike in a civil war. I didn’t agree with Noah on everything, and sometimes I thought he got a little over his skis when he was playing outside his academic discipline, but he also struck me as more or less a normal moderate liberal.
Now, though? Now he’s writing about the scourge of “Islamoleftism,” posting that the United Kingdom could succeed Iran as “the standard-bearer of global Islamist ideology,” and implying that “racial hiring preferences” should be limited to low-wage service sector roles where Black workers are already overrepresented. He also endorsed Elon Musk as Trump’s Secretary of Defense. Weird shit, in other words.
I don’t mean to pick on Noah too much. He’s just one guy, and he’s not the most egregious example by any means. I think there’s a decent chance that one day, when he’s no longer on X, he’ll look back on his “Islamoleftism” with regret. But that’s exactly my point. Prolonged X exposure is deranging people who should absolutely know better.
And thanks to the sort of feedback loops that are endemic on social media, sometimes that derangement can hit enough people simultaneously that it has a real impact on American politics and the news we consume. Ganz cites Vincent Bevins pointing to one relatively innocuous example: the mass delusion among many X-addicted journalists that Trump’s 2024 victory coincided with a marked lurch to the right in American culture and popular opinion. This was the now largely memory-holed “vibe shift.” Bevins writes:
My own assertion, itself vibes-based and therefore entirely unfalsifiable, is that the “vibe shift” was the unconscious cognitive effect of hanging out on Twitter after Musk’s acquisition. It was experienced, and only needed to be experienced, in the minds of the US American media class. One of the main skills required of contemporary journalists is the ability to detect which way the wind is blowing, to carefully trace the hidden boundaries of discourse. For those who spent too much time on his platform over the last four years, Elon made the left appear less popular (in the middle-school sense).
[…]
Looking at Zohran Mamdani’s victory and actual data, the perceptive David Wallace-Wells concluded this summer that the (political) “vibe shift” was a mirage. Yes, it was. But the appearance of a mirage is also a phenomenological fact, a historical event, and Elon Musk used economic power to create it. […] He destroyed a part of the public sphere where his enemies used to thrive. Along the way, he made racist and reactionary positions feel more normal to journalists.
Perhaps a more consequential example is the Graham Platner bubble. If you don’t remember who that is, he was the Maine Senate candidate who, with his tattoos and gravelly voice, was supposed to attract the white working class back into the Democratic tent. He was also a former Blackwater mercenary with a Nazi tattoo, and, as it turned out, an alleged rapist.
In a postmortem on Platner’s since-dissolved campaign, Slate writer Alex Kirshner observes that Platner was, as the headline says, “the perfect Twitter candidate.” Even after it was revealed that Platner had an SS tattoo, many of the liberal and left-wing pundits who have stuck around on X turned into Platner dead-enders. It was only after Politico broke the news about the first rape allegation that most (but not all) of those dead-enders jumped ship.
But as even the guy who initially recruited Platner into the race later admitted, “the tattoo should have been enough” to disqualify him from running for the Democratic nomination in Maine’s Senate race. And among almost all the politically engaged people with whom I discussed Platner, it was enough. All of them, I should say, except for the people who are still active on X. (I should note that even after everyone learned about the Nazi tattoo, Platner still won the primary handily.)
How to explain that divide? Some of it may be the result of who self-selected into remaining on X. But I suspect that the larger factor is that liberals and leftists on X are swimming in a swamp where the use of Nazi ideas and iconography is basically normal. The owner of the platform does it and elevates other people who do it instead of moderating them out of existence. So if a little dalliance with Nazism is basically unexceptional, should it really be disqualifying? After all, everyone is doing it.
Some of the people who later had to recant their Platner support due to the rape charge are now insisting they have no regrets. Prior to that Politico story dropping, there was no reason to suspect him of being anything other than a flawed but basically decent guy. I see it differently: wearing a Totenkopf tattoo on your skin for the better part of two decades may not prove you’re an unreconstructed Nazi, but at an absolute minimum it proves that you have poor judgment and a low moral character. A lot of the commentators who argued (and, in some cases, continue to argue) otherwise are people who spend a nontrivial portion of their lives on a platform owned by a Nazi.
After Napoleon ordered the execution of the Duke of Enghien, Talleyrand (or someone else in Napoleon’s circle) is said to have observed that the death sentence “was worse than a crime; it was a mistake.” Among the X-addicted political and media elite, we might say that Platner dead-enderism was worse than a mistake; it was a professional embarrassment. If you need proof, watch the Pod Save America boys try to do damage control after their earlier exertions to hype up the Platner campaign. They’ve eroded their credibility with their own progressive audience, and they know it.
If you’re on X and you want to avoid similar mortification, then one of the best things you can do for yourself is quit X immediately. Stop giving Elon Musk unrestricted access to the darkest recesses of your brain.