Kirsty Wiggleswort / AP, file
Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X, gestures during an event with Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London on Nov. 2, 2023. IBM has stopped advertising on X after a report said its ads were appearing alongside material praising Adolf Hitler and Nazis.
Monday, Nov. 20, 2023 | 2 a.m.
X marks the spot where racism and antisemitism have found a home in the United States of America, after white supremacist conspiracy theorists crowned a new champion last week in Elon Musk.
On Wednesday, the billionaire swindler and troll made the grotesque decision to publicly endorse a post on X (formerly Twitter) containing several white supremacist conspiracy theories about Jews secretly hating white people and conspiring to bring in “hordes of minorities” to take over Western countries.
After purchasing the company last year, Musk transformed it in his own image, creating a haven for white supremacists, antisemites and conspiracy theorists — and mainstreaming, even celebrating, hate speech. Earlier this year, Musk even threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League because it correctly pointed out that antisemitism surged on X after his takeover.
However, prior to Monday, the revolting depths of his personal bigotry hadn’t been fully on display. Apparently, that’s no longer enough, as Musk decided to share the aforementioned post with his own 160 million followers, accompanied by the comment, “You have said the actual truth.”
If Musk cared about the “actual truth,” he would know that Robert Bowers, the man who murdered 11 people in a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, espoused the same conspiracy theory in his final social media post before the shooting. Hours later, Bowers perpetrated the deadliest single attack against Jews in American history.
It’s also the same conspiracy theory espoused by the man who murdered a dozen people at a grocery store in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y., last year, and the gunman who killed more than 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019. It was also the driving antisemitic hysteria behind the deadly Charlottesville, Va., white supremacist march. Adolf Hitler even used the conspiracy theory as a weapon of propaganda in his quest to eliminate Jews during the Holocaust. That’s the actual truth.
Less than 24 hours after Musk’s hateful and conspiracy-laden retweet, IBM paused roughly $1 million in advertising on the social media platform. In a statement, IBM said it “has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination, and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation.”
Other advertisers should follow suit as they realize the very real risk of having their ads appear next to statements that would be more at home in Nazi Germany than the United States.
In a classic example of corporate damage control lies, Linda Yaccarino, X’s CEO, sent out a message to employees and via X on Thursday declaring that “X is a platform for everyone” and that “discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board.”
But with Musk’s continued ownership and manipulation of X, it’s unclear whether Yaccarino’s statement is meaningless. Musk is officially the Chief Technology Officer of the company. If Yacarino and the X board of directors had real integrity, they would either fire Musk and vote him off the board of the company he owns, or resign en masse. Anything less is appeasement of a monster.
By Friday, even the White House weighed in, as spokesperson Andrew Bates released a statement saying that, “It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of antisemitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms.”
All of this comes amidst the backdrop of an astonishing rise in hate across the United States. Just Friday, the Department of Justice announced a probe into antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents at American universities. In the current post-shame political environment hatefully curated by Donald Trump and the far right, Americans must face the reality that we are approaching a crossroads in which we must decide who we want to be as a nation.
Elon Musk may have made himself the latest symbol of racism, antisemitism and hateful vitriol last week, but he is just the tip of the iceberg in a growing white supremacist movement in the United States.
In the aftermath of Hamas’ deadly terrorist attacks on Israel, bias-motivated attacks against American Jews, Muslims and Arabs have skyrocketed.
The Anti-Defamation League documented 832 antisemitic incidents of assault, vandalism and harassment between Oct. 7, the day Hamas attacked Israel, and Nov. 7 — more than three times the number recorded over the same period last year.
At the same time, the Council on American-Islamic Relations received 1,283 requests for help and complaints of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias, doubling the average over the same number of days last year.
Significant increases in hate crimes against Black, brown and LGBTQ+ people have also been recorded in recent years.
While we would love to say that we have a clear and comprehensive solution readily at hand, the reality is that the United States of America is only as great a nation as the people who call her home, including the political and business leaders who define our public discourse. Musk’s X, by virtue of cheerfully providing safe harbor for the most hateful expressions imaginable, should be spurned by all advertisers.
Unfortunately, too many Americans — not a majority, but too many nonetheless —feel more at home on Musk’s X than in America’s beautifully diverse melting pot of races, ethnicities, religions and identities.
Whether American individuals and corporations continue to make a home for ourselves on X or anywhere else that provides shelter to white supremacists, antisemites and conspiracy theorists is up to us.
