X’s Echo Chamber Gets a Reality Check
A collection of right-wing influencers, chief among them Shaun Maguire, smeared an innocent Brown University student. What happens now?
In early November, I wrote a piece for Hard Reset about Shaun Maguire, a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia. The piece included interviews with tech founders and entrepreneurs who denounced Maguire for Islamophobic, offensive remarks he made about incoming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It also cited a Financial Times report that Sequoia COO Sumaiya Balbale resigned from her lofty position because Sequoia and Maguire took zero accountability for his harmful rhetoric.
That piece was titled “Sequoia Still Has a Shaun Maguire Problem.” Barely a month-and-a-half later, Sequoia has a much bigger Shaun Maguire problem—and Maguire himself is vulnerable to a massive lawsuit. He’s not the only one in X’s echo chamber whose lawyers have presumably been racking up billable hours over the last handful of days.
On December 13, a gunman committed a mass shooting at Brown University, killing two students and wounding nine more people. Under the auspices of FBI Director Kash Patel, a shoddy manhunt ensued. The feds and local police didn’t locate the gunman, nor did they have any significant leads, and so on December 15, the same man was also allegedly able to kill MIT physics professor Nuno Loureiro.
The lack of meaningful updates about the gunman’s identity and whereabouts concerned and angered Americans of all political stripes, and inevitably led to speculation and rumor-mongering. That does not excuse what happened next.
On December 16, Maguire—who has almost 300,000 followers on X—posted a video falsely accusing an innocent person of murder. Maguire said that there was “very strong evidence that this Palestinian activist Mustapha Kharbouch—who’s a Brown [University] student—was likely the person who committed the murders of these two students.” Without evidence, he stated that Loureiro was Jewish, insinuating that his murder was an antisemitic hate crime; in a separate X post from the same day, Maguire explained that he was pretty sure Loureiro was Jewish because Google Gemini said so, and also because he saw a social media post from a man with the same first and last name that was critical of Hamas. There is no evidence Loureiro was Jewish, and the social media post was predictably from a different man with the same name.
Nevertheless, Maguire had to keep spinning the yarn. He found a way to connect the mass shooting back to Mamdani, blaming him on video for “being unwilling to criticize the phrase ‘globalize the intifada,”’ adding, “there are ramifications here.”
Maguire doubled down on his unsubstantiated smear. He and a number of other influential right-wingers on X, including Laura Loomer, acted surprised that as their harassment campaign unfolded, Kharbouch’s name was scrubbed from the Brown University website. Rather than intuiting that falsehoods about an innocent person might prompt some protective measures, Maguire, Loomer, and others took Kharbouch’s disappearing digital footprint as evidence that they had Scooby-Doo’d the case. “I would say this is reasonable evidence that it actually was the student,” Maguire said on the same video. “Or, at least that it was extremely likely that it was the student.” (Great save, Shaun.)
On December 18, authorities identified the gunman as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old man from Portugal who attended Brown in the early 2000s. We still don’t know much about Neves Valente or his motives. But we do know he likely took classes in the building where he carried out the mass shooting, and that he was classmates with Loureiro in the ‘90s, when they both lived in Portugal. Neves Valente was found dead in a storage locker in New Hampshire, having reportedly died by suicide.
Maguire quietly deleted his video and is back to posting about other subjects. Loomer—who tip-toed right up to the line of accusing Kharbouch of murder, but stopped just short—has pivoted to other hateful angles so she can keep invoking Kharbouch’s name to her 1.8 million followers. Other right-wing influencers, including billionaire Bill Ackman, still have reposts on their pages from the likes of Newsmax anchor Rob Finnerty, who did an entire segment about how Kharbouch “fits the description of the suspect” solely off grainy surveillance footage. Ackman also shared a post from an X user purportedly named Josh Hall, who flat-out accused Kharbouch of murder.
Kharbouch has since released a statement with the help of their legal team, an indicator that they’re considering litigation against Maguire and others. “The past few days have been an unimaginable nightmare,” Kharbouch wrote. “I woke up Tuesday morning to unfounded, vile, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian accusations being directed towards me online. Instead of grieving with my community in the aftermath of the horrible shooting, I received non-stop death threats and hate speech.”
I do not know whether Kharbouch will move forward with a defamation lawsuit. Even though they appear to have a very strong case, it’s daunting, time-consuming, and expensive to take wealthy right-wingers to court. Some of those right-wingers have built their public profiles on never backing down. Their blueprint is Candace Owens, who’s amassed an enormous viewership while peddling conspiracies about Charlie Kirk and Brigitte Macron. The Macrons sued Owens in July, and she has since baselessly accused them of funding an assassination plot against her, while tossing out bizarre theories about Kirk that are too convoluted to get into here. Owens seems to have decided it’s more lucrative for her to spout nonsense and fight any lawsuits that arise than it is for her to apologize and pay out a settlement. The latter punctures her brand and breaks the spell she has on her viewers.
What Owens is saying and doing is reprehensible, but she’s probably making the correct choice, assuming her goal is to keep her media career alive. Loomer, who once handcuffed herself to Twitter headquarters as a publicity stunt, is in a similar boat.
Maguire and Ackman have much more at stake. On X, the two men have been insulated and pampered by sycophants and bots and other yes-men. In their safe space, Maguire and Ackman are aspirational right-wing influencers, but outside of it, they’re ostensibly still venture capitalists and hedge fund managers. Their careers overlap with the real world, where the Trump administration and much-ballyhooed MAGA “vibe shift” are rapidly falling out of favor, and the average person still believes that falsely accusing someone of murder is beyond the pale. I imagine that’s why Maguire deleted his accusatory video, and Ackman seems to have stopped posting about the Brown University shooting.
If Kharbouch does move forward with a lawsuit, Maguire and Ackman will have a decision to make. They can go the way of Owens and Loomer, or they might consider rejoining civil society, if for no other reason than to selfishly salvage their careers and avoid a costlier potential payout. Given that I previously wrote about Maguire’s antics a month ago, it’s reasonable to conclude he (and Ackman) will do zero serious reflecting or course-correcting, and instead burrow deeper into X, the everything app.
Here’s what else we’re reading this week:
If you want to learn more about America’s gerontocracy—and you’ll forgive me for indulging in some self-promotion—I just wrote a feature for New York Magazine about 88-year-old Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. The piece examines the degree to which Norton is being assisted on personal and professional matters by her office and campaign staff amid growing concerns about her mental acuity.
On December 18, Alphabet Workers Union issued a forceful statement about Google’s new partnership with the Department of War. The partnership integrates Google’s “Gemini for Government” AI platform so that it’s usable for more than three million civilian and military personnel. The AWU statement pointed out that Google workers have no idea how their Gemini contributions will be applied by the U.S. military, and that Google has abandoned “a thoughtful set of AI principles published in 2018, a North Star that guided us as we entered this new technological frontier.”
Julie K. Brown, the preeminent reporter on Jeffrey Epstein and related subjects, has a quick and useful primer on the “Epstein Files” that were released on December 19. “It’s clear that the Department of Justice is not only thumbing its nose at the public’s demand for transparency and accountability, it is not taking the crimes committed against children seriously,” Brown writes. “It’s as if they think we are so hungry for any crumbs about Epstein that stale bread will do.”
Rather than parsing through the Department of Justice’s crumbs, read this exhaustive investigation from the New York Times about how Epstein got rich. You’ll learn much, much more.
The Bari Weiss 60 Minutes saga is still unfolding, but my snap take is that Weiss has no journalism experience (that’s not me gatekeeping—she really doesn’t!), and she’s not an astute boss. I would encourage others to resist the urge to assume she’s making 4D-chess moves in the way people talked about Donald Trump in the 2010s. Weiss wants to be in the good graces of the Trump administration, no doubt, but she also clearly had no clue how much blowback she’d get for arbitrarily postponing an investigative piece at the last minute. She’s in a powerful role, but she’s making decisions from a position of weakness. She’s in way over her head.