Elon Musk: The Bigot in Full

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

This, I think it is safe to say, did not age well:

As recently as October 2022, the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee (or at least Jim Jordan and his committee staff) thought that this was the new Trinity of the Right—a pantheon of stable geniuses and world-bestriding trolls who would bring the right into the shining future.

Let’s see how it’s going.

After dining with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago along with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, Ye descended into a black hole of madness, bigotry, and well-deserved obloquy. Trump faces 91 felony charges as he promises a presidency devoted to revenge and retribution. And then there is Elon.

For the moment, let’s set aside his world-historic trashing of the site that used to be called Twitter, his fluffing of Putin, and the general infestation of his brain by termites.

On Wednesday, the world’s richest man, the avatar of the revanchist right, took to social media once again. And the result was pure, undiluted Jew Hate.

Euphemisms fail. Here is this morning’s Drudge Report:

I regret to tell you that this is not an exaggeration. On Wednesday a Xitter user posted:

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. 

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.

Musk’s response, sent to his alleged 63 million “followers”:

This does not require 20,000 words of tortured exegesis. It’s not a critique of Israeli government policy; it shares no deep thoughts about a two-state solution; it is raw, undiluted antisemitism.

We can continue to debate the relative toxicity of the Jew-hatred on the right vs. the antisemitism on the left. But Musk’s message was unmistakable and his groyper Nazi fans absolutely loved it.

As the Daily Mail notes, Musk’s latest X follows a depressingly familiar pattern:

Musk has a long history of toying with dog-whistle rhetoric about Jewish people, in particular George Soros, who enraged him in May by selling his Tesla stock.

He has also angered people with his response to the Israel-Hamas war.

In the days after the October 7 Hamas terror attack, Musk was forced to delete a tweet, which recommended an anti-Semitic account and a promoter of debunked videos as reliable sources of information about the attack on Israel.

But even Musk seems to have realized that he may have crossed some invisible red line even in his own world. The uber-edgelord tried to backtrack, insisting that, of course, the mass murder of Jews “is unacceptable to any reasonable person.” Which was awfully reasonable of him.

But since we are talking about Musk, within minutes he was lashing out again at the Anti-Defamation League and “any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind”:

Exit take: He will undoubtedly have more Deep Thoughts in the days to come. But by now — I think it is safe to say — he’s definitively told us who he is. Any questions?

Ben vs. Candace

This leads us inevitably to today’s Honorary Chairman of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, Ben Shapiro and his star hire, Candace Owens.

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Via Rolling Stone: ‘By All Means Quit’: The Daily Wire’s Biggest Stars Are Fighting

THE DAILY WIRE has descended into unrestrained chaos as an ongoing spat between its founder, Ben Shapiro, and one of the right-wing outlet’s biggest names, Candace Owens. The pair’s disagreements over the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas have now spilled into a public fight on social media…

 Despite the Daily Wire’s past posturing as a platform wholly committed to free speech, video emerged on Tuesday of Shapiro calling Owens’ commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “absolutely disgraceful,” during a private event. 

In response, Owens tweeted a verse from the biblical gospel of Matthew. “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” The post suggested that Owens would not cease her vocal criticism of the conflict to placate her employer. 

Shapiro was incensed. “Candace, if you feel that taking money from The Daily Wire somehow comes between you and God, by all means quit,” he responded. 

Naturally, she took her beef to the Troll King Himself, Tucker Carlson.

Right-wing commentator Candace Owens responded Wednesday to The Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro’s sharp criticism of her comments regarding the Israel-Hamas war, telling Tucker Carlson in an interview that though she would not be making “ad-hominem attacks,” her fellow right-wing commentator should be “embarrassed” over his handling of the situation.

Going out on a limb here: This seems unlikely to end well.

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Mike Johnson: A Polite Zealot

On Wednesday’s podcast: We may have averted a government shutdown for the moment, but the new speaker of the House believes dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark. Pete Wehner joins me for a deep dive on Mike Johnson. Plus, the Closing of the American Mind on the right.

You can listen to the whole thing here. Or watch us on YouTube.

Bonus: How’s that Mike Johnson honeymoon going? It’s already over. Via Semafor: “Under Johnson, House Republicans still look ungovernable.”

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Quick Hits

1. Book Review: ‘Network of Lies,’ by Brian Stelter — the New York Times

Some prep for tonight’s live event in D.C.:

Stelter has watched a lot of Fox News, nearly as much as anybody alive. In doing so he has been — to borrow a term from “Succession,” the Murdoch family-inspired HBO series — a national pain sponge. He has been glued to the set, eyes peeled, notebook in hand, so others don’t have to be.

He really lets the brown water flow over you. His Fox News is a nightly Russell Stover assortment of ginned-up grievances and predictions of cataclysm and collapse. The network delivers insinuation instead of reason, in this account, irritable gestures instead of journalism, a great deal of voice and little of mind. Fox News is biased against expertise and culture. Its hosts patrol and destroy, as white blood cells do in the body, any hint of sequential reasoning. They deliver the kind of shallow and primitive totalitarian propaganda that George Orwell, in “1984,” called prolefeed. In “Network of Lies” it is a dead-end grotto of the human spirit. Flood the zone with wit, as Steve Bannon did not say.

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2. The GOP’s Abortion Evasions

Will Saletan in the Bulwark:

In the Republican presidential race, the two men who stoutly advocated a federal ban on abortions—Mike Pence and Tim Scott—are gone. The candidates who remain on the debate stage or who don’t need it—Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Donald Trump—are hedging or downplaying the issue. They still call themselves pro-life. But they’re finding ways to pretend that they’re not a threat to abortion rights.

Here’s a look at their evasive maneuvers.

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3. Punching Politicians and Trump’s Belligerence

Dennis Aftergut in this morning’s Bulwark:

Before Tuesday’s unhinged Republican behavior recedes from memory, it’s worth emphasizing one aspect of it that has been underappreciated in the press coverage: that it didn’t happen in a void, but rather fits into larger patterns in the world of Donald Trump.

Time and again, Trump has issued permission slips to those who practice violence. His fascination with the use of force, including by violent militias like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, is well documented. Tuesday’s events can only really be understood in that larger context of Trump and violence.

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Cheap Shots

We’re doomed.