There is no debating what this is
We can argue all day about whether supporting Palestinians or criticizing Israel is antisemitism but this is the real deal and can’t be denied. And it was disseminated by the man who owns one of the world’s most powerful social media platforms directly to his 160 million followers.
The conspiracy theory, that Jewish populations are pushing “hatred against whites” and supporting “hordes of minorities” coming into the country, is the same one that motivated the 2018 Tree of Life shooter in Pittsburgh, as noted by The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg. Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and other figures linked to white nationalism are cheering on Musk.
The Tree of Life shooter, who was found guilty this year, wrote on far-right platform Gab that he blamed Jewish people in the U.S. “for bringing in an invasion of nonwhite immigrants.” (Gab owner Andrew Torba is also one of the people cheering on Musk; Gab’s X account even bragged about red-pilling Musk on “JQ” – that is, the “Jewish question.”)
But the true middleman between the Tree of Life shooter in 2018 and the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is Fox News — and specifically Lachlan Murdoch.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, a Fox guest railed against the “Soros-occupied State Department.” TPM’s Josh Marshall noted that this claim was “straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the foundational anti-Semitic tract.” The guest was banned from Fox; in retrospect it appears his main offense was being ahead of the curve.
Indeed, it did not take long after the Tree of Life shooting for the conspiracy theory to pop up on Fox News, with former host Glenn Beck in particular making a similar argument while appearing on Sean Hannity’s show.
The major inflection point came when then-Fox host Tucker Carlson pushed his own version of replacement theory in 2021. There was a big outrage — but Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch personally made clear that Carlson had the green light to go there. And go there he did. A New York Times analysis, conducted before Fox fired Carlson, shows that he pushed it in more than 400 episodes.
And now it’s not just Carlson. Numerous Fox personalities and others have followed his lead and made the conspiracy theory into a core plank in GOP politics.
Of course, Carlson now effectively works for Musk.
People need to start wrapping their minds around the fact that the current crisis in Israel and Gaza is complex and difficult and if they don’t start educating themselves bad actors like Musk and his Nazi friends’ exploitation of this situation are going to being us to a very bad place.
As Tom wrote this morning in this extremely disturbing post, it’s already happening and millions of naive, under-educated kids are buying it in ways that just chill the blood.