Musk Triggers the Left — Again
This time, the debate is over whether he endorsed anti-Semitism on his X platform.
Elon Musk owns so much real estate in the minds of censorship-crazed leftists that he doesn’t even have to say things for them to hate him for it.
“Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” said some random guy on X. “I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest s**t now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”
Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.”
Cue the hysterics.
We find this interesting for a couple of key reasons. First, as we indicated at the outset, Musk’s stand for free speech is so antithetical to what modern leftists stand for that he drives them even more insane almost by virtue of existing. He’s a successful (South) African American who’s really thankful to have emigrated to America. And he put $44 billion of his own money where his mouth is to buy one of the most influential social media platforms on the planet. He says it’s worth about half that now, but his restoration of free speech is priceless.
They’ll never forgive him.
In fact, some big companies are pulling advertising from X over Musk’s comment. Apple, IBM, Disney, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Lions Gate Entertainment, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount among others all announced a “pause.”
The White House even weighed in, saying, “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.”
And we all know how much Joe Biden’s White House cares about our core values.
That brings us to the second reason this episode is intriguing. Media Matters for America says that Musk “endorsed the pernicious antisemitic conspiracy theory,” which happens to be “the same one that motivated the deadly 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting.”
We confess that we don’t tend to visit the corners of the Internet where anti-Semitic conspiracy theories thrive, so we can’t speak to whether Media Matters’ assertion is accurate — other than to say we don’t trust a left-wing rag like Media Matters to tell the truth.
Media Matters clearly has an agenda here, too, pointing to all the “bigots and paid far-right extremists” Musk has allowed to have a voice on X. “Corporate advertisements have also been appearing” next to unsavory accounts, Media Matters alleges.
As a side note, we do sometimes wonder whether anyone can ever say anything critical of a Jew or Jews without being labeled “anti-Semitic.” There is anti-Semitic hatred, and there is legitimate criticism of the behavior or choices of individuals or groups. They are two different things.
The original tweet with which Musk agreed was certainly ugly, but even ugly free speech is still free speech.
Still, at a time when Israel recently suffered the worst loss of life since the Holocaust and anti-Semitic hates crimes of various sorts are soaring in America, Musk’s comment was at best a bad look and he was unwise to promote it.
Yet there are also obviously Jewish groups that are very left-wing, and therefore on the same political side as the most rabid “pro-Palestinian” haters. American Jews face a time for choosing, as it were.
“Certain Jewish organizations have bought into and promoted things like diversity, equity, and inclusion, which are gross distortions of the American dream,” said commentator Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish, in defense of Musk. “Many of those groups have also pushed for open borders. It is also true that some of those organizations are now realizing post-October 7, that actually open immigration for people who hate Jews on an intersectional basis was pretty stupid.”
In follow-up comments on X, Musk insisted he was specifically referring to the left-wing Anti-Defamation League “and other Jewish groups [that] are pushing replacements of whites.” He and ADL do have a long-running dispute over how much censorship should be employed against people on X. He says his criticism doesn’t “extend to all Jewish communities.”
He was not nearly clear enough about that in his first comment, which Shapiro also acknowledged.
In any case, the aforementioned companies agree with Media Matters. But the ad boycott has Musk threatening a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters, which he argues “colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”
We’re left to wonder if anyone at those companies is as angry with the people chanting Hamas’s genocidal “from the river to the sea” refrain as they are with Musk for an ill-advised and vague comment.