Another day, another messy thoughtless political flareup by Elon Musk. The man obviously can’t stop erratically shooting messengers in his clumsy attempts to protect and promote hate speech.
The tactic he uses often mirrors well-known Nazi propaganda, where anyone reporting harms is blamed for those harms. Like if someone said systemic racism in America has resulted in positions of power held only by white men, they would be accused by Elon Musk of expressing bias against white men.
Kristallnacht in November 1938 is just one of many examples of this turnabout.
The German government made an immediate pronouncement that “the Jews” themselves were to blame for the pogrom [instigated and orchestrated by Nazi officials] and imposed a fine of one billion Reichsmark (some 400 million US dollars at 1938 rates) on the German Jewish community. The Reich government confiscated all insurance payouts to Jews whose businesses and homes were looted or destroyed, leaving the Jewish owners personally responsible for the cost of all repairs.
Victims of systemic racism were blamed for it; Jews falsely accused of being the ones causing all the trouble that Nazis directed at them.
We learn from history that the act of silencing critics, by illogically assigning blame to them, is not something to be taken lightly as it often accelerates harms. And yet Elon Musk is one of the biggest speech censors on the Internet given how he tries to cancel all criticism he dislikes.
Tesla has ballooning technical safety issues precisely because his engineers work hardest at hiding important safety criticisms from the CEO.
They are literally killing people with negligent disregard for those who report harms.
Who can forget this episode, for example?
To be clear, those of us in 2016 who reported that Elon Musk’s fraudulent claims about “driverless” were going to get people killed… were accused by Elon Musk of getting people killed.
See the problem with such word games?
Tesla in fact then began killing more, and more, and more people… all the while trying to blame it on someone, anyone else.
In other words if we had accused him of racism (i.e. his work environment has been repeatedly judged by courts as obviously racist) he would have called us the racists even as he kept on barking about “his struggle” (mein Kampf) to personally intervene and stop extinction of the white race.
Here’s one thread to observe:
And here is another one, from an attempt to meddle in Scotland politics.
A spokesperson for Yousaf said on Friday: “The first minister has been on the receiving end of racist hate, abuse and death threats his entire life, and has stood firm against hatred and bigotry, of any kind, throughout.
“Sadly, much of the racist abuse and threats of violence the first minister faces are directed his way on X. Mr Musk should use his position to tackle racism and hatred that goes unchecked on the social media platform he owns.”
[…]
Musk, the owner of Tesla, Space X and the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, reacted to a 45-second clip of Yousaf listing all the senior public posts in Scotland held by white people, which was posted on X by an anonymous account called End Wokeness.
The account, which has a paid-for blue verification mark, accused Yousaf, who is Scotland’s first ethnic minority first minister, of “openly despising white people”. It said: “Why would Scotland’s parliament and King select a guy who hates almost 100% of the country?”
Musk replied: “What a blatant racist!”
Got that?
A public servant who has spent his life being anti-racist, who has dedicated himself to protecting people from racism, gets accused of being the racist by an infamously racist troll (from a racist family) who has used ill-gotten wealth to convert Twitter into a racist hate speech spigot. The truth is fairly obvious here, right?
Backwards and upside down, Musk keeps repeating the worst and most ignorant mistakes in history as if he found a magic loophole to avoid accountability for being racist.
Also note the role of a blue verification mark. It has come to represent little more than troll accounts either paid for by Russia or coin-operated mules trying to juice attention.
Related:
- Twitter Blue is a hate speech indicator
- Twitter Blue promotes Russian misinformation operations