Why are so many people invested in trying to prove Elon Musk is not an extremist?
The dispute about whether Musk’s Inauguration Day salute amounted to the “sieg heil” or an unintentional gesture was too juicy to pass up. The Anti-Defamation League, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Al Jazeera and just about everyone else on the internet piled onto the controversy.
We were treated to freeze-frames of Taylor Swift, Justin Trudeau, Michelle Obama and other notables raising their hands mid-wave, as if proving some kind of equivalence. This is the kind of drama guaranteed to garner sensationalist headlines, passionate arguments and lots of attention.
But it really doesn’t matter.
That’s because Musk already has a demonstrated history of antisemitism. We don’t need to know whether his gesture was intended as a Nazi salute. Musk uses his massive social media platform, X, to support, spread and encourage antisemitic lies, conspiracies, accusations and attitudes to tens of millions of people.
After Musk bought what was then Twitter in 2022, he proudly reinstated white supremacists, Jew haters, racists, Holocaust revisionists and other far-right figures who had previously been banned for their nastiness. He uses his personal account to attack Jewish organizations that critique his decisions. He declared that the “great replacement theory” — the conspiracy that Jews are intentionally supplanting white Americans with minorities — was “the actual truth.”
Yes, he has done photo-ops at Auschwitz and with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in both Israel and this week in Washington, D.C. But whatever lessons Musk should have learned from those experiences clearly haven’t changed the way he uses and manages X.
After donating hundreds of millions of dollars to the Trump campaign, Musk is now extending his influence to European elections, where he has become an outspoken promoter of some of Europe’s most far-right political parties, including the increasingly extremist Alternative for Germany. Moderate Europeans, who have worked so hard to try to eradicate the demons of the 20th century, are watching with trepidation as Musk helps resurrect them.
Musk’s ideological leanings are plain to see. He’s certainly not the first world-changing industrialist to adopt bigotry and antisemitism. Devoted antisemite Henry Ford had the Dearborn Independent newspaper to promote his noxious hatreds. Musk has X — and where that doesn’t suffice, he has the attention of the global media obsessed with his newfound power as head of Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk may not be as overt in his hatreds as Ford was, but that’s small comfort. Claiming a spot on the “less antisemitic” side of the spectrum is hardly a positive.
Does Musk really hate Jews in his heart of hearts? I have no idea. But it doesn’t matter. Whether he harbors anti-Jewish prejudice or just thinks it’s funny to troll Jews, the effect is the same.
Wave after wave of bigotry is directed at Jews on the platform he owns and in the public discourse he takes part in. He has the power to curtail the abuse and certainly to refrain from engaging with it himself, but refuses. Let’s not absolve him of responsibility for his behavior.
Regardless of his intentions, antisemites took his salute at face value, assuming he was sincere in signaling his support for their extremism.
“We are so back,” a right-wing commentator posted on X. And now Musk’s supporters are repeating the Nazi salute as a show of solidarity.
Even if Musk is “awkward” (as the ADL said) or “autistic” (Musk has openly discussed for years that he has Asperger’s Syndrome, an outdated diagnosis that used to be applied to some people with Autism), he has no excuse for inexorably heading in the direction of far-right extremism.
The week of Musk’s salute saw a number of antisemitic acts around the globe. A Jewish childcare center in Sydney, Australia, was spray-painted with “F*ck the Jews” and then set on fire. Thankfully there were no injuries. Police also foiled a bombing plot against a local synagogue there. In downtown Tel Aviv, a Moroccan national with U.S. residency stabbed four people in an act of terrorism. And at the start of Columbia University’s new semester, Israeli professor Avi Shilon was interrupted while “teaching about the conflicting Israeli and Palestinian narratives surrounding Israel’s 1948 War of Independence,” according to the Times of Israel. Anti-Israel protesters burst into the room, shouted lies and slogans and threw flyers at the students.
We can’t stop Musk from gesturing. We can’t stop him from promoting extremist conspiracies. But we can refuse to indulge him or excuse his behavior as harmless or misinterpreted.
So let’s not focus on the debate about whether Musk is, or is not, an antisemite. His comments and jokes, the events he speaks at, the groups he targets and now his physical behavior all add up to a pattern of antisemitism.
He is showing us who he is, and we should believe him. Someone of his temperament should not be given such extraordinary power over wide swaths of our government and the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people. He doesn’t deserve the benefit of our doubt.