No, Elon Musk is not an antisemite and other misinformation the media pretends is true

Most Jewish people are Democrats and the Democrat Party is closely aligned with the critical race theory, anti-racist agenda that openly seeks to redistribute resources to groups they perceive as disadvantaged, meaning from supposedly privileged whites, many of whom are Jewish, to people of color, most of whom are not. 

The world’s second richest man and most high profile free speech advocate, Elon Musk, found himself in the middle of a firestorm earlier this month after the media seized upon his response to another person’s tweet as “antisemitic.”  The first user posted a rather rambling statement referring to the obvious and well known fact that Jewish people as a whole are significantly more progressive than the average person.  “Okay. 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 s*** 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.”  While the phrasing might be inflammatory, no one seriously doubts the underlying sentiment given Jews are largely progressive and progressives have not been coy about their positions.  According to the Pew Research Center, a whopping seven out of ten Jewish people are Democrats while only 26% are Republicans.  The Democrat Party, of course, is closely aligned with the critical race theory, anti-racist agenda that openly seeks to redistribute almost every manner of resource to groups they perceive as disadvantaged, meaning resources will flow from supposedly privileged whites, many of whom are Jewish, to people of color, most of whom are not,  to use the parlance of the day.  Whatever your opinions on the underlying theories, the Biden Administration has attempted to use its authority to do exactly that since day one, nor have they done anything to hide their purpose.  On January 20, 2021, the day President Biden took office, he issued an executive order on “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”  The order highlighted the “unbearable human costs of systemic racism” and directed the Office of Management and Budget to “allocate resources to invest sufficiently, justly, and equally in underserved communities.”  Today, there is an entire section of the White House website devoted to “equity,” summarized as “The Biden-Harris Administration has a far-reaching equity agenda, which also includes implementing the first-ever national strategy on gender equity and equality; working to ensure the federal government is a model for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the workforce; delivering environmental justice through the Justice40 Initiative; and advancing LGBTQI+ civil rights. These commitments also reflect attention to the reality that some individuals experience discrimination based on multiple factors and are particularly underserved.”  So extreme is their position that communities of color should be served ahead of white people, programs they have advanced have been struck down by the courts for violating equal protection.

Simultaneously, the Biden Administration, aided by Democrats and progressive groups, have aggressively pursued pro immigration and open borders policies, resulting in a record number of border crossings.  The Migration Policy Institute summarized these efforts earlier this year, “On his first day in office, President Joe Biden announced sweeping plans to reform decades-old U.S. immigration laws, undo many of the restrictive policies of the predecessor Trump administration, and provide a pathway to legal status for the nation’s estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants.”  While the President has not been able to successfully advance his agenda through Congress, “From January 20, 2021 through January 19, 2023, the Biden administration took 403 immigration-related actions, according to calculations by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), putting it on track to soon overtake the 472 immigration-related executive actions MPI counted for all four years of the Trump administration.”  These “measures have…affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including many seeking protection. Among these changes were more targeted interior enforcement; regulations to fortify the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides work permits and protection from deportation to unauthorized immigrants who arrived as minors; expanding humanitarian protection through Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and other programs; and unblocking legal immigration channels that had been chilled by the pandemic.”  In addition to millions of illegal entries, the President has increased legal immigration by approximately 30%, temporary visas by almost 3 times (to be fair, that was compared to the tail end of the pandemic), doubled the allotment for employment visas, and naturalized the most people in fourteen years.  The vast majority of these migrants are people of color. My point is not to debate the merits of these policies, but simply to make clear that the Democrat Party has aggressively pursued every possible strategy to increase the proportion of the population that isn’t white.  In addition, various, largely progressive pundits and authors have championed the “browning” of America for over a decade.  As NPR covered it in 2016, “The country is changing — it’s getting browner, as population growth slows among whites. Non-whites now make up a majority of kindergartners; by the next presidential election, the Census Bureau predicts they will be a majority of all children; and by 2044, no one racial group will be a majority of the country. America is at a demographic inflection point. The crosscurrents of demographic and cultural change are upending traditional voting patterns and straining the fabric of what it means to be American…The Democratic Party has adapted to this demographic change, and is more diverse, more urban and more liberal than at any time in its history. The Republican Party, on the other hand, has struggled.”  In 2008, Ronald R. Sundstrom, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco, devoted an entire book to the subject, titled The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice.  Social Theory and Practice, reviewed it, “The Browning of America stands as a significant contribution to the philosophical literature on race and racism. Sundstrom’s…engagement with the debates surrounding color-blind policies and ideals, as well as his arguments for the importance and viability of multiracial identity, all help to make what is a relatively short book pack a significant philosophical punch.”  

Moreover, the progressive establishment in Western countries over the past several decades has embraced the concept of “multiculturalism” rather than the traditional notion of a melting pot where various cultures align on core values and contribute to the overall fabric of society.  The Encyclopedia Britannica defines multiculturalism as the “the view that cultures, races, and ethnicities, particularly those of minority groups, deserve special acknowledgment of their differences within a dominant political culture. That acknowledgment can take the forms of recognition of contributions to the cultural life of the political community as a whole, a demand for special protection under the law for certain cultural groups, or autonomous rights of governance for certain cultures; identity politics may be tied to each of these actions. Multiculturalism is both a response to the fact of cultural pluralism in modern democracies and a way of compensating cultural groups for past exclusion, discrimination, and oppression.”  Proponents of multiculturalism were warned that organizing groups of people by race and culture in a multiethnic country, living side by side in their own enclaves but not together as Americans, Britains, etc., will result in increased racial tensions, a decrease in positive racial relations, and other forms of strife, all of which have happened and then some.  Rather than recognizing that the project has failed and resulted in a more acrimonious society, much of the establishment still clings to it, branding anyone who disagrees or points out the obvious flaws as racist.  Recently, Britain’s (former) home secretary, Suella Braverman delivered a speech in Washington, DC that claimed multiculturalism has “failed in Europe,” citing various clashes between ethnic groups “on the streets” of Malmo, Paris, Brussels, and Leicester.  “Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate,” she said. “It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it,” adding that in extreme cases some groups can “pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society.”  You may agree or disagree with Ms. Braverman’s conclusion, but nothing she cited in support of it was not factual and if anything, incidents like those she mentioned appear to be increasing especially in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Israel.  This didn’t prevent her critics from claiming she was literally harming people of color.  As one put it “Braverman’s dangerous rhetoric puts pupils [from migrant backgrounds] at risk” in British schools.  Ms. Braverman was ultimately relieved of her position.  Regardless, no one has ever taken multiculturalism to mean different ethnic groups of European descent living in separate enclaves or seen it as a means to better honor the contributions of Jewish people to American life.  The entire focus has always been people of color, be they Hispanic, Muslim or Arab, Asian, or other descent.  

Somehow, Mr. Musk is the antisemite for pointing this out and the reality of our troubling political dynamic has become a “racist conspiracy theory.”  As CNN’s Jill Filipovic described it, “Jewish groups quickly pointed out that the statement Musk endorsed as ‘the actual truth’ is actually a version of a racist conspiracy theory. The idea is that Jews are letting immigrant invaders into the country to strip Whites of their power and destroy White culture.  And it’s not just some bigots bantering on social media. This ugly ‘Great Replacement’ theory has been behind mass shootings that have targeted specific racial or ethnic groups, including at a grocery store in Buffalo that killed 10 Black shoppers and employees.”  Of course, the “Jewish groups” making these claims about Mr. Musk are all progressive as well. Mr. Musk has, in fact, taken personal aim at them for this reason, restating much of his original point if there was any confusion about what he meant.  For example, he claimed the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) “unjustly attacks the majority of the West…because [the ADL] cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat.”  We know this is true because the ADL itself has been open about its progressivism for years, openly stating they are making common cause with other minority groups.  Their website proudly proclaims that “Anti-Semitism is Creeping into Progressivism,” reprinting a Time Magazine article by Jonathan A. Greenblatt from 2017.  According to the ADL itself, “we find common cause with many in the BLM movement around the quest to achieve educational equity, end the school-to-prison pipeline and stop the use of excessive force and the killing of unarmed African Americans by some in law enforcement.  In the case of the Muslim community, we work to combat discriminatory laws such as the Muslim Ban, to call out Islamophobia whenever it happens, such as the recent use of scare tactics to stoke fear that Sharia law is taking over this country and to promote greater understanding of their faith through intergroup work.  And regarding the LGBTQ community, we were proud to stand against discrimination of HIV/AIDS patients decades ago and, more recently, to champion marriage equality. We continue to fight housing and workplace discrimination targeting people based on who they love or how they self-identify their gender. And while great progress has been made in recent years, we continue to resist efforts to turn back the clock under the guise of religious freedom.”

Meanwhile, local chapters of BLM have praised the Hamas attack against Jews, even using imagery of paratroopers in their social media posts and proclaiming common cause with the enemies of the Jewish people. What more evidence does one need that at least some Jewish people are making common cause with those who hate them exactly as Mr. Musk suggests? Whatever you personally believe, this is what Mr. Musk is referring to, pretending he doesn’t have a point is simply denying reality.  Ms. Filipovic even went one step further, citing a slanderous study from Media Matters that claimed Mr. Musk himself is both an antisemitic and he is running X as an antisemitic company, creating a safe haven for white nationalists and Nazis.  Media Matters is, of course, another radically progressive group and in order to “prove” this theory they effectively hacked X’s advertising algorithm to trick it into displaying advertisements along with posts from Nazi sympathizers.  No media organization to date has been able to recreate this trick in anything resembling what a regular user of X would experience, and Mr. Musk has sued Media Matters for slander, but that doesn’t stop Ms. Filipovic from insisting, “Under Musk’s leadership, X has turned into a swamp of prejudice and bigotry.”  Ultimately, he “is proving to us, over and over again, that what he believes to be true is profoundly ugly, bigoted and false. We should listen, and understand that the world’s richest man is saying exactly what he means.”  I would suggest a different conclusion:  We should instead understand that Ms. Filipovic and others are engaged in a personal crusade against Mr. Musk because he has taken a fervently pro-free speech stand that they despise and they are willing to spread misinformation, distorting the truth and slandering him personally, to take him out. Incredibly, they are willing to do this even in the face of an explosion of real antisemitism in progressive ranks, where people around the world are openly calling for the extermination of Jews. For some reason, we should not take them at their word, but we should distort the words of Mr. Musk.