Apartheid Beanie Baby Elon Musk spent Labor Day weekend engaged in the traditional American pursuits: cookouts, shopping at mattress sales, overt antisemitism …
Actually, we don’t know about the cookouts and the mattress sales, but there was plenty of overt antisemitism! Even George Lincoln Rockwell was impressed, and he’s been dead since 1967.
The subject of Musk’s ire this weekend was the Anti-Defamation League, the 110-year-old organization that has as its core mission the battle against antisemitism. The ADL has long closely monitored Twitter, which for a long time was a cesspool of white supremacist content. The organization had worked to get Twitter’s old management to ban accounts that trafficked in Holocaust denial and tweeting about sticking the site’s Jewish users into ovens and all those old chestnuts. And for a while, this actually worked: Hate speech on the platform noticeably dropped.
Then Musk took over and under cover of screaming about his free speech absolutism, started unbanning those accounts. And there was much rejoicing! By Nazis, anyway. Decent people, on the other hand, have been fleeing the platform like beachgoers fleeing the ocean when a shark mistakes them for a buffet.
The ADL and its head, Jonathan Greenblatt, have been documenting the rise in hate speech that directly followed all this unbanning. Last week Greenblatt met with Linda Yaccarino, Twitter’s CEO. Afterwards, Greenblatt tweeted that he and Yaccarino had a good and productive discussion about the platform’s resurgence of hate speech, and that he was hopeful he would see changes moving forward.
Elon’s response? Side with the white supremacists who were very upset that someone is pointing out that they are a bunch of bigots.
From Haaretz:
After helping #BanTheADL trend worldwide over the weekend, replete with posts riddled with antisemitic conspiracy theories and smears, the world’s richest man continued his attacks on the Jewish anti-discrimination organization while threatening legal action.
Yes, Twitter has seen a huge drop in advertising revenue over the last year since Musk took over the platform. There are multiple likely reasons for this drop: Musk’s erratic and mercurial management, Musk’s firing most of the Twitter staffers whose job it was to sell advertising and maintain advertiser relationships, the platform’s technical degradation, users moving to Twitter’s competitors like Bluesky and Threads, to name just a few.
Or if you’re Musk, you can just blame the Jews. That also works:
Luckily he has a foolproof plan to deal with these bastards who are ruining his fun by pointing out that he keeps embracing the worst antisemites while painting himself as some sort of beleaguered businessman who just wants to make an honest living but the Jews won’t let him:
Twitter was worth nowhere near the $44 billion that Musk plunked down for it. It’s worth less than half that now. In the extremely unlikely, Bizzaro World event that such a lawsuit made it to the penalty phase without getting laughed out of court and into the nearest dumpster, the only people who would blame the ADL for Twitter’s revenue drop to the tune of $22 billion in compensation would be Musk’s fanboys and Hitler’s zombie retinue from his bunker. But we repeat ourselves.
How dumb is this? Musk is getting us to side with the ADL, for god’s sake. Normally we disagree with the ADL a lot. It does valuable work, but it also tries to shut down any criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians by equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. It has been known to blame both the Left and Right in equal measure for antisemitic incidents in America, despite its own stats saying such attacks are far, far more prevalent on the Right.
Oh, we could go on and on about the ADL. And have! But the organization is right on this one.
Musk’s white supremacist fanboys are thrilled that their hero agrees with them. Andrew Torba, a white supremacist who founded the social media platform Gab to give bigots a place to go when Twitter started banning them, tweeted an article claiming that “the ADL fuels hatred of Jews by attacking free speech,” a sentiment to which Musk gave his seal of approval:
Blaming the Jews for their own misfortune is an old antisemitic trope that pops up in some form or another during periods of heightened antisemitism. The Nazis claimed Jews had been responsible for Germany’s poverty and humiliation in the years immediately after World War I. The white supremacist who killed 11 people in a synagogue in Pittsburgh a few years ago blamed Jewish organizations for helping nonwhite migrants come to America as part of their “Great Replacement” plan.
In conclusion, fuck off, Nazi Tom Corbett.
Speaking as someone who works with advertising and brand safety for a multibillion-dollar corporation, Elmo, the ADL has nothing to do with our keeping our Ameros out of your bank account. It's the utter lack of brand controls, strategy, stability, curbs on racists and white supremacists and Nazis, and the preponderance of CSAM content ... and your general lack of grey matter that is keeping us away.
You killed twitter, dumbass.
Oh. So blaming the Jews for all your problems is anti-Semitic now?
By Elon Musk