Elon Musk and anti-Semitism- like peanut butter and rancid jelly

There's nothing like accepting responsibility for your own stupidity, eh?

I used to think that communication with a stupid fool would be useful for him. But now I have changed my mind. Nothing would be better for him than to keep his stony silence.

• Elmar Hussein

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

• Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

So, how was your Labor Day (or Labour Day, if you’re Canadian) weekend? Did you get a lot of rest? Or perhaps you enjoyed a last blowout of summer? Or maybe even some college football? Whatever you may have done, I’d wager your weekend was nothing like Elon Musk’s. He spent his holiday figuring out how to blame his poor his business decisions regarding Twitter/X on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

There's nothing like accepting personal responsibility for your f**k-ups, eh??

Right. The same social media platform Musk has turned into a megaphone for anti-Semitism and assorted Right-wing tomfoolery is circling the drain because of ADL. Sounds about right, no??

No. Just…no.

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.

So Musk succeeded in turning Twitter, now called “X” for reasons he can’t fully explain, into da Interwebz’s one-stop shopping destination for all manner of ugly, overdeveloped anti-Semitism.

As you might imagine, those who’d worked so hard to get Twitter/X to cleanse the platform of anti-Semitic activity, including ADL, weren’t pleased.

But, being the good, rational folks they are, ADL did the right thing and returned to Twitter/X to see what could be done to right the ship.

Man, talk about misplaced optimism….

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.

No one likes having the truth that they’re bigots and anti-Semites pointed out to them- so Elon Musk decided that he’d stop telling them the truth.

Problem solved, eh?

Well, not exactly. At least according to ADL.

Over the weekend, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper posted this:

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.

Yeah, and he seemed so nice for an anti-Semitic bigot and all-around self-important asshole….

Most observers agree that the decline and fall of Twitter/X can be traced directly back to Musk’s inept and mercurial management style. This has led to the platform falling behind technically, increasing security issues, and the welcoming of growing numbers of Right-wing trolls.

All of these reasons account for why individuals, businesses, and organizations have fled Twitter/X like it has a horrible and incurable social disease, which, in a sense, it does. At one time, Twitter/X was the world’s foremost social media platform. Now, however, it’s a shadow of itself and a joke. Its demise has spawned the creation and rise of many new, safer, and more secure platforms. I have accounts on Post, Mastodon, Tribel, Telegram, Instagram, Threads, and probably one or two others I can’t remember now. Most of these probably wouldn’t exist if Elon Musk hadn’t run Twitter/X into the ground.

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha…. The man has a future in comedy. Not a bright future, to be sure, but a future of some sort.

That he’s blaming ADL for his execrable decision-making is laughable. He laid out $44 billion for a platform worth nowhere near that much. As soon as he walked in the door of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, he began slashing jobs to cut costs. He was so over-leveraged that he began cutting anything that seemed extraneous, including essential parts of the business. Because of this, the platform’s technical infrastructure resembles a ‘71 AMC Pacer with four bald tires, a cracked windshield, and smoke pouring from under the hood.

Other than that, it’s in great shape.

[Feel free to insert a picture of a smiling jackass here.]

I’d been booted from Twitter/X before Musk purchased it, so I’ve enjoyed watching him blow up something I no longer cared about. I felt like a drone pilot sitting at a screen in the Nevada desert, watching things disintegrate half a world away. I knew those explosions had a real-world impact, but all I did was push a button. In Twitter’s case, I could laugh from a distance as Elon Musk, the supposed boy business genius, turned a $44 billion investment into a pile of money that wouldn’t buy a McDonald’s franchise in Rugby, ND.

Unfortunately for Musk, his idea for laying a $22 billion lawsuit on ADL will almost certainly be laughed out of any court it lands in. I’m not an attorney, but I suspect that any half-sober country lawyer could show that the proximate reason for Twitter/X losing so much value is Musk’s ineptitude and incompetence. All it would take would be a timeline of Musk’s decisions since the moment he took over Twitter/X; that’s pure comedy gold.

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.

Sure, I also have my issues with ADL, just as I do with the ACLU. Overall, though, they do good work- and in this case, they’re doing the Lord’s work.

And Elon Musk isn’t nearly as brilliant as he fancies himself to be.

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:

Unfortunately for Elon Musk, blaming ADL as “the biggest generator of anti-Semitism on this platform” isn’t nearly the flex he thinks it is. It’s just an ancient anti-Semitic trope that reappears whenever increased anti-Semitism rears its ugly head, as seems to be the case these days. It’s also Musk’s way of saying that since it’s a problem of ADL’s creation (it’s not), he sees no reason to do anything about it (because he’s a loser).

And then you wonder how a virulent anti-Semite can kill 11 people peacefully gathered in a synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Elon Musk won’t see the connection; he’ll never see a connection between the anti-Semitism he fosters and coddles on Twitter/X and mass shootings like Pittsburgh.

Hate speech is mother’s milk for those willing and able to turn that speech into action. It’s been proven time and time again in this country. Elon Musk may delight in it all, but there’s nothing remotely humorous about any of this. As the number of anti-Semitic attacks rises in this country, it seems only a matter of time before someone repeats an attack similar to the one in Pittsburgh.

I can’t help but wonder; will Elon Musk blame that on ADL??

(All of my posts are now public. Any reader financial support will be considered pledges- support that’s greatly appreciated but not required to get to all of my work. I’ll leave it to my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their monetary support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.)