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Michael Hiltzik: Elon Musk is an antisemite. What can anyone do about it?

Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times on

Published in Business News

The question of how you solve a problem like Elon Musk has crossed the line from an amusing little parlor game to an issue with serious implications for anyone doing business with him, including major corporations and the U.S. government.

Little that Musk says or does escapes popular notice, but a tweet he posted Wednesday on X, the platform he owns which was formerly known as Twitter, is in a category all his own.

Musk replied to a user's antisemitic tweet accusing "Jewish communties" of "pushing the exact kind of ... hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them." The user went on to accuse "western Jewish populations" of supporting the flooding of the U.S. by "hordes of minorities."

Musk's reply was: "You have said the actual truth." Within hours, his tweet had attracted more than 6 million views.

Monitors of far-right tenets recognize this one as the "great replacement theory." It holds that Jews are behind a movement to import non-white immigrants in order to diminish the political standing of the white majority.

The American Jewish Committee, in a tweet of its own, called it "the deadliest antisemitic conspiracy theory in modern U.S. history."

 

A white nationalist and Nazi claim, it was the theme of the antisemitic 2017 "unite the right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and the motivation behind the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, in which 11 worshippers were shot to death.

The perpetrator of the synagogue terror attack, Robert Bowers, has been sentenced to death.

This is not the first time that Musk has purveyed antisemitism on X. In September, he accused the Anti-Defamation League of destroying much of the value of X by pressuring advertisers to abandon the platform.

"The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform," Musk had tweeted.

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