Peanut the squirrel shows Elon Musk is wrong about the mainstream media

Was it Peanut wot won it? One of the stranger and more incendiary aspects of the run-up to the recent US election was a Twitter/ X howl-round about Peanut the squirrel. The house where Peanut lived was raided, and this blameless rescue-rodent euthanised, after a complaint was apparently filed to a government agency by a neighbour. And Peanut’s story went super-viral. 

Rather than seeing it as a local hard-luck story, many social media users supposed this to be a paradigmatic instance of what was at stake in the election. This wasn’t human interest: this was front-page stuff. If they come for Peanut now, was the rough line of reasoning, they’ll come for you next: this is why the right to bear arms is so important.

Such was the outrage at the squirrel’s death that within a fraction of a news cycle, a name was put to the woman who had supposedly dobbed Peanut in.