With the Milwaukee Brewers sitting comfortably at the top of the NL Central, you might think that it's an easy time to be their vice president of communications. Post the Jake Bauers highlight reel, oversee some decent memes featuring Bernie Brewer, and let the good vibes keep on flowing. All you have to do is not commit any big misstep. For example, don’t repost Elon Musk tweets in support of far-right British politicians who peddle racist propaganda about Britain being threatened by violent immigrants.
I would go as far as to say maybe just don't retweet Elon Musk at all, but what do I know? I'm not the vice president of communications for the Milwaukee Brewers. Tyler Barnes is, and on Tuesday he popped onto Twitter after a two-year hiatus to weigh in on British politics by retweeting Elon Musk's white genocide propaganda.
The right-wing party Restore Britain and its leader, Rupert Lowe, have been rapidly gaining support with calls for mass deportations and a belief "that Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith," according to the party spokesperson. Lowe is the kind of politician who feels comfortable saying things like "anti-white filth has infected Britain." Lately, he's been using the murder of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa to push conspiracy theories about the white population of Britain being under attack by immigrants. Restore Britain's growing appeal and the increasing rightward shift of British politics may explain why Reform leader Nigel Farage was compelled to call for “pure cold rage” in response to the murder. With the help of Elon Musk, who is once again salivating like a dog at the attention of a charismatic fascist with a bad haircut, support for Restore Britain has expanded all the way to the NL Central.
Inquiring minds may want to know why the vice president of communications for the Milwaukee Brewers decided that Musk and Lowe's racism was worth sharing with his followers. Unfortunately for inquiring minds, the vice president of communications for the Milwaukee Brewers did not respond to my email asking him why he shared those tweets. Instead, a few hours after my email was sent, the tweet disappeared from Barnes's feed.
Before he dipped his toe into the global rise of fascism, Barnes's account was all uninteresting sports tweets, Brewers promotions, and the occasional dog picture. His last tweet, from February 2024, was retweeting the announcement of a Kansas City Chiefs podcast. Being a Chiefs fan is not necessarily an indicator of fascist tendencies (despite what I have yelled at my television during a Chiefs-Bills playoff game), but supporting nativist politics and working in senior management for a professional baseball team is a far more likely correlation.
It's hardly unheard of for those within baseball to be supportive of fascist political movements, and it's increasingly common for them to have no sense of shame about it. But one would think that a person whose job is to communicate in a clear and engaging manner would at the very least have an explanation. Maybe Barnes was acting as an upstanding citizen and spreading information about the rising tide of hateful and racist rhetoric across the world. Maybe he was overtaken by an evil version of himself. Hell, maybe he just clicked the wrong button. We may never know. So far, he has failed to communicate.
