Mick Hartley

It's not just the refusal to give Kyiv access to his Starlink communications network over Crimea, preventing Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian navy, that suggests that we should be worried about the power wielded by Elon Musk. As Dominic Lawson notes in today's Sunday Times, he's also been diving deep into antisemitic territory:

Who is to blame for the misfortunes of Elon Musk’s X — formerly known as Twitter? Its advertising revenues have been collapsing. The answer to that question, apparently, is: the Jews. Last week Musk tweeted (or X’d) that, “Our US advertising revenue is still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!”

ADL is the Anti-Defamation League, created by the B’nai B’rith movement in 1913 “to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience, and if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people”. But Musk has now threatened, via X of course, to use the law against the ADL: “If this continues, we will have no choice but to file a defamation suit, against, ironically, the ‘Anti-Defamation’ League”. Musk added that the ADL “would potentially be on the hook for destroying half the value of the company, so roughly $22bn”.

But what is the evidence that the precipitate fall in revenues at Twitter/X is “primarily” due to pressure on advertisers by the ADL? Musk has not provided any for his extraordinary allegation, still less given specific examples.

The head of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, insisted that until last week his organisation had itself been advertising on Twitter and had not pressured companies to pull out: “So the notion that we were trying to kill the company, that’s a fiction.”

Journalists in America investigating this matter report that the real concern of advertisers is Musk’s own lurid tweeting, making them nervous of association with what such an unpredictable character might say through the medium of his own product.

As if to confirm the validity of such concerns, Musk last week on Twitter/X followed up a user who quoted the toxic conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (author of the claim that the shootings of children at the Sandy Hook school was a “hoax” involving actors) that the ADL is “the most pro-Hitler organisation I’ve ever seen”. Musk added: “The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform!”

As Yair Rosenberg wrote in The Atlantic: “Abuse of Jews on his site, he argued, is the consequence of Jews complaining about the abuse. (Chronology does not appear to be his strong suit).” Greenblatt, asked whether he thought Musk was espousing antisemitism himself, responded that the site’s owner was “engaging with users who are blatantly and boldly doing so, and that’s very problematic. I would say that blaming the Jews or the ADL for antisemitism also . . . evokes the age-old tropes that we work so hard to fight.” …

Musk’s tenure at Twitter/X has not been without its commercial successes. He had courted Tucker Carlson after Fox News had fired its most controversial presenter; and in June this talented fellow popped up with a new show called Tucker on Twitter. His first episode has been viewed more than 120 million times. In it, Tucker attacked Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, with a veritable medley of antisemitic tropes. Zelensky, Carlson said, was “sweaty and ratlike”, “shifty, dead-eyed”, and “a persecutor of Christians”.

This last one was perhaps a reference to the fact that Zelensky had proscribed religious organisations “affiliated with centres of influence” in Russia. Yet it is Vladimir Putin who has been laying waste, physically, to Ukraine’s churches, most recently in the bombing of Odesa’s Transfiguration Cathedral. As Stephen Daisley observed in The Spectator, Tucker’s taunt is redolent of the “deicide myth, which blames the Jews rather than the Romans for the crucifixion of Christ”.

You will not be surprised to know that Carlson’s Twitter broadcasts are enthusiastically promoted by the Russian media — although Putin put his own grotesque twist on it when last week he told Russian TV that Ukraine’s “glorification of Nazism” was linked to the fact that the country had a Jewish president. Putin argued that the West had “put a person at the head of modern Ukraine — an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins. So in my opinion, they seem to be covering up an anti-human essence that is the foundation of the modern Ukrainian state.” Yes, it’s the Jews as Nazi facilitators, again.

Last month, one of Carlson’s star guests on his Twitter/X show was a retired US colonel, Douglas Macgregor, who in 2014 appeared on Russia Today to call for Russia to annex the Ukrainian territory of Donbas (it duly did) and more recently insisted that Russia should have beaten the Ukrainians into submission within the first few days of the full-scale invasion, but had been “frankly . . . too gentle”. In October 2021, Carlson’s guest of honour, now the head of an organisation called Our Country, Our Choice, blamed America’s problems on what “the Russians used to call certain individuals, many, many years ago, rootless cosmopolitans”. That would be the Jews.