Musk and the great replacement theory
Elon Musk lights his tiki torch
The latest edition of the Elon Musk Twitter experience features the unfathomably wealthy right-wing owner of the site arguing that Jews are wrong about antisemitism. In his telling, Jewish communities are overly concerned with white nationalists like those he has welcomed to his social media platform, when they should worry instead about the brown “hordes” that they themselves have welcomed to the United States.
“You have said the actual truth” was Musk’s Wednesday night response to a paid X Premium user who, in explaining why “Hitler was right,” accused Jewish communities in the U.S. of “dialectical hatred against whites” and blamed them for “flooding their country” with “hordes of minorities.” Musk went on to clarify that he was not talking about all Jews, just the Anti-Defamation League (which has criticized Musk for white nationalist content on his platform) and unnamed others he claimed were “unjustly” focusing on “the majority of the West” rather than “the minority groups who are their primary threat.”
There’s a lot to unpack here, all of it bad. Musk is promoting the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, as many have noted. That blood-soaked fantasy was touted by tiki torchbearers chanting “Jews will not replace us” and echoed by several murderous white supremacists, including the terrorist who massacred Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue, even as it spread through Fox News and the right-wing media and became a fixture of GOP politics. And unlike others who have adopted a less explicit version of the theory, Musk is, in the parlance of the white nationalists who applauded his remark, explicitly “naming the Jew” as the source of the problem.
Can we get Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and the Google dudes in a room with Musk so they can all gang up on him? He won’t listen to peons.
He is boosting white nationalists because he agrees their views are “the actual truth.”
He agrees with them that criticisms of white nationalists are actually attacks on the entire white population.
He agrees with them that anti-white racism is a major American problem and that there is a broad conspiracy seeking the “extinction” of white people.
He agrees with them that Jews in particular who criticize white nationalism are really engaged in “hatred against whites.”
Media Matters ends with “We are all in a lot of trouble.”
Updating to include the tweets themselves, in response to Coel’s flattering description of them.
I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit 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. You want truth said to your face, there it is.
“Can we get Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and the Google dudes in a room with Musk so they can all gang up on him?”
I’m not confident that we could embrace the outcome of such a gang up. Those three dudes are ruled by serious cases of “saviour syndrome” – they might find some really terrible common ground,. The Google dudes already think they should always control the world’s acces to information and data (which may actually be true in regards to anyone who relies on their search engine, mail services or “cloud” storage)
Yes probably. It was mostly just a dark joke.
The opening of an article on the matter in The Atlantic:
‘The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people … Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Those were the last words posted online by Robert Bowers before he massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. It was the single deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. In previous postings, Bowers explained the grievances that led him to commit mass murder. He shared meme after meme asserting that Jews were conspiring to flood the country with brown people in order to oppose and displace the white race. “Open you Eyes!” declared one. “It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!”
‘On Wednesday night, the world’s wealthiest man affirmed this same conspiracy theory on X, formerly Twitter, the social-media site he owns. Like so many of Elon Musk’s acts of self-immolation, it happened in the space of a tweet. The incident began with a post from a conservative Jewish user who complained about anti-Semitic content on social media during the current Gaza conflict. “To the cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and posting ‘Hitler was right,’” he wrote. “You got something you want to say? Why dont you say it to our faces.” A small-time white-nationalist account soon responded by attributing this anti-Semitism to minorities, and blaming it on the Jews…’
No more since I am not a subscriber, but the article seems to laying out the context rather well.
Chimps, bonobos, gorillas and whales don’t have this problem. It’s a wonder they don’t get together and tell our lot to stop fucking around and get ourselves sorted. Not that we’d listen. Still, I wonder, would things have gotten so bad if critters of our level of smarts had evolved from one of the social insects instead of primates? Or would super-intelligent bees/ants/termites have ended up painting themselves into a corner inside a house on fire as well, just along a slightly different path?
It would be great if we could come up a way of preventing sociopaths, psychopaths (or even normally level-headed individuals who might lash out while having a bad day) from gaining so much power. It’s just bad planning to let your well-being be dependent upon what happens to shake out of some guy’s abnormal psychology. How many presidents, kings, and god-emperors does it take to figure this out? Has there ever been another species on Earth where individual members of its ranks can contribute so decisively to a mass extinction event? We’ve had thousands of years; the world can’t afford our desultory learning curve much longer. Had the Hitchhiker’s Guide been a little more particular by giving an entry to our own species rather than to the planet as a whole, it might have been “Doesn’t play well with others” instead of “Mostly harmless.”
” It was mostly just a dark joke.”
Ah! I missed how nicely it fits into our “just because you’re paranoid . . .” world.
Dark Jokes are pretty much where we live these days?
“Chimps, bonobos, gorillas and whales don’t have this problem. It’s a wonder they don’t get together and tell our lot to stop fucking around and get ourselves sorted.”
Oi – wouldn’t that be lovely!
“Has there ever been another species on Earth where individual members of its ranks can contribute so decisively to a mass extinction event?”
Perhaps – to riff on the American Constitution – the answer to that is “self evident”?
Through flukes of evolution our species gradually crawled it’s way to the ability to self-destruct. The herd/hive instinct is alive and well with humans, and it has certainly been shaped by individuals, most “recently” by the the various abrahamic fanatics who refuse to accept that we are not “endowed by our creator” but that we are birthed and raised within societies that we then share responsiblity for.
There are neither gawds, nor the chosen people’s of gawds. When people start blathering on about “the lands gawd gave to me”, we need to pause and question.
This is the usual freak-out over Musk by saying that he said or meant all sorts of things that he didn’t say or mean. Read in context it is obvious what he meant.
He was agreeing that many Jews in America and American universities have gone along with a lot of DEI wokeness and the demonisation of “whiteness”.
Then, after October 7, they suddenly find themselves being labelled as “white” and being painted as the bad guys by a lot of people they had thought of as allies.
So, all Musk is saying is that they should have realised the probems with DEI wokeness and the demonisation of “whiteness” much earlier.
There is nothing at all anti-Semitic about Musk’s comments here. He is indeed right.
But “many Jews in America and American universities have gone along with a lot of DEI wokeness and the demonisation of “whiteness”.” is not what @breakingbaht said. That’s a very prettified version of what he said. What he said was “Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” That’s a good deal more coarse and brutal than your rewrite of it.
@Ophelia:
OK, yes, that wording is more coarse. But it means much the same thing. And again, the underlying sentiment is opposition to woke/DEI demonisation of white people and “whiteness”.
And it is fair enough to comment that many American Jewish people supported or went along with this, up until the rude awakening of the left’s reaction to Oct 7. Indeed, many Jewish people are now saying exactly that.
(A good source for that is Bari Weiss’s “Free Press”, Bari Weiss being someone with a long track record of opposing DEI wokeness, after having been sacked from the NYT for doing so.)
Thus, Musk’s sentiments here are nothing like how they are being misrepresented by “Media Matters” et al.
And why not quote the rest of Musk’s Tweets in the thread, here they are, with some added clarification:
Musk: “The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West [white people?], despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups [presumably Muslims?] who are their [Jew’s] primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop.”
Then in response to someone:
“You right that this does not extend to all Jewish communities, but it is also not just limited to ADL”
And then, just to clarify further:
“And, at the risk of being repetitive, I am deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind. I’m sick of it. Stop now.”
This is clearly opposition to the DEI/wokeness that demonises white people, and the “white adjacent” Asian Americans and indeed (since Oct 7) Jews.
To read this as anti-Semitic is ridiculous, it’s pretty much the opposite of what Musk is saying. He is clearly opposing the identity-politics wokeness of dividing everyone into “whites” versus people “of colour”.
And just some more context, here Musk replies to a Tweeter who says:
“If you’re spending all your waking moments trashing Elon Musk for “antisemitism” because he had the audacity to criticize progressive Jewish organizations for their anti-white policies but you remain completely silent about actual anti-Semitic politicians and groups, it’s transparently clear where your priorities lie, and that you’re not actually a serious person.”
Musk replies with: “Bullseye!!”.
The “actual anti-Semitic politicians” here could well be the Democratic “squad” (AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib etc) who are way more anti-Semitic but who don’t get criticised by the ADL because in woke-left ideology people “of color” cannot be in the wrong.
On another occasion Colin Wright Tweeted:
” “Decolonization” is the woke version of jihad, and it should be viewed and treated that way.”
To which Musk replied: “Yes, “decolonization” necessarily implies a Jewish genocide, thus it is unacceptable to any reasonable person”.
No, he’s not anti-Semitic, he’s anti-woke.
And the Media Matters” tactic of stringing together plucked few-word phrases with commentary that misrepresents the intent entirely is utterly dishonest.
Yes, context matters. And the immediate context of the twit that Musk was praising was someone calling out twits who post anonymously that “Hitler was right.” Neither Musk nor the twit he was praising bothered to make even a pro forma statement along the lines of “Of course I don’t believe that Hitler was right.
So yeah, context.
@Coel:
Your defense of Musk here, while I don’t disagree with it really, still doesn’t make him look very good. Just shows he’s not a particularly thoughtful or serious person. Makes me glad I wasn’t born into a wealthy family because I could definitely see myself ending up like that.
Elon Musk & Henry Ford
Two examples of people who can competently run an innovative industrial company, but still have very harmful ideas in other areas.