In the latest kerfuffle between Elon Musk and the media outlets that hate him, Musk has fired back with a vengeance, with the promise of more to come.

Musk's X Corp filed a federal lawsuit in Texas against Media Matters of America last week, charging the liberal censorship group with contract interference, business disparagement, and interference with prospective economic advantage.

If only he could add CNBC, the New York Times, and other media as defendants. They were careless or intentionally complicit in helping Media Matters spread a bogus, contrived, and unfair story aimed at pressuring advertisers to quit Musk’s platform.

The X counterattack came four days after Media Matters reported that the platform formerly known as Twitter intentionally places ads for Apple and a few other sponsors next to antisemitic, pro-Hitler content. It posted a few screenshots of this — on X itself.

The article claims, "As X owner Elon Musk continues his descent into white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, his social media platform has been placing ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBC Universal), IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party."

But it turns out these ad matchups were incredibly rare and intentionally rigged to appear by Media Matters itself, according to Musk.

Overall, X says more than 99% of the millions of ad impressions on the platform appear next to "healthy" content.

The opening paragraph of the lawsuit from Musk states, in part: "Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers' posts ... beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then portrayed these manufactured images" as if they were the norm for X users.

Media Matters worked hard to invent what amounted to 50 bad matches — out of 5.5 billion impressions on X that day, the lawsuit goes on to say. That is infinitesimal. An Apple ad cited by Media Matters, for example, ended up appearing on only two accounts out of some 550 million accounts on X, and one of them was the reporter's, the lawsuit adds.

To engineer these matches, the group used an account that followed only 30 feeds, all of them advocates of Nazi or other hate content, according to Musk. Then, the reporter (who also is a defendant in the suit) clicked and clicked on the feed, trying to make a bad matchup happen and calling up 13 to 15 times as many ads per hour as the typical account would show.

Media Matters disclosed none of these efforts to skew the results in its report. And the resulting avalanche in media coverage left out these pertinent facts and hidden agendas.

The liberal group has been hypercritical of Musk's takeover from the start, publishing 20 disparaging articles in the past year. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Media Matters was founded in 2006 by Clinton ally David Brock as a "progressive research and information center" targeting "conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Only conservative misinformation, got it?

In 2016, Brock handed control to Angelo Carusone, a liberal activist who was a deputy finance chief for the Democratic National Convention in 2016. He had been involved in efforts to cancel or boycott Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Donald Trump (in 2012), and Rush Limbaugh.

Ironically, Carusone himself, around 2005, published a blog in which he made fun of his gay romantic partner's "jewry" and made numerous disparaging references to "trannies." He later apologized, which, for liberals, ends the matter.

Another unreported fact: Over the years, Media Matters has received millions of dollars in funding from George Soros's Open Society Foundations. Musk has criticized Soros multiple times for funding the election of soft-on-crime prosecutors, including on Halloween night on Joe Rogan’s podcast: "In my opinion, he [Soros] fundamentally hates humanity. That's my opinion. He's doing things that erode the fabric of civilization, you know, getting DAs elected who refuse to prosecute crime. That's part of the problem in San Francisco and LA and many other cities. So, why would you do that?"

It will be interesting to see what is revealed in the Musk lawsuit against Media Matters once the discovery process unearths all emails between the group and reporters, advertisers, and Democrats. In Texas, state Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced a related investigation of Media Matters for "potential fraudulent activity."

The X counterattack could broaden. As Musk himself promised in a tweet on Monday night after the suit was filed: "The first of many."

Dennis Kneale is a writer and host of the podcast What's Bugging Me on Ricochet.