Does Elon Musk admire Mel Gibson’s antisemitism, or just his ‘buff’ biceps?
His comment on a bigoted post recalls an earlier exchange with Kanye West
Elon Musk wants to know if Mel Gibson lifts. Photo by Getty/Jean Catuffe/AFP/Canva
By PJ Grisar June 8, 2023
People try all kinds of things to stay in shape: diet, exercise, Ozempic. Is Elon Musk considering Judenhass for his fitness journey?
On Wednesday, Musk commented on a tweet from a user named TopLobsta that juxtaposed 80-year-old Joe Biden, appearing to be asleep on a chair in the White House, and 67-year-old Oscar winner and Jew hater Mel Gibson in a muscle shirt. The caption not-so-subtly alluded to a raft of conspiratorial canards presented as lifestyle choices: “You can do adrenochrome or you can hate the Js. Which way western man [sic].”
Rather than react to the conspiracy theory that our president subsists on blood from children (adrenochrome) or that hating Js (Jews) is somehow salubrious — never mind the name drop of a 1978 white nationalist text (Which Way Western Man?) — Musk asked a question: “Gibson is really that buff these days?”
? Elon Musk has gone beyond dogwhistles and has now engaged with an explicitly antisemitic tweet.
— Elad Nehorai (@EladNehorai) June 7, 2023
“Js” here refers to Jews. The implication is that Mel Gibson is buff because he hates Jews. And that Biden drinks the blood of children (blood libel).
This is beyond dangerous. pic.twitter.com/Ldtr4mcY4T
It’s nothing new for Musk to miss the point — or at least pretend to. Often his boosting of the world’s worst trolls comes in the form of anodyne comments like “interesting” or “looking into this.” Observers know exactly what Musk’s doing, even as the ADL, Alan Dershowitz and Israeli diplomats fall over themselves to insist that he isn’t antisemitic in the aftermath of him calling George Soros Magneto.
But to pretend Musk is always playing 3D-chess in his regular interaction with bigots — instead of tic-tac-toe with a twig in the dirt of his “digital town square” — might be giving him a bit too much credit. Is he a canny operator? Maybe. But he’s also the dude who walked into Twitter HQ with a sink, tanked Tesla stock by smoking pot with Joe Rogan and named his vanity drilling enterprise “the Boring Company.” He’s a troll himself.
When Jonathan Greenblatt made the infamous gaffe of likening Musk to antisemite Henry Ford, the words proved somewhat prophetic, as Musk’s Twitter is a welcoming environment for fresh re-imaginings of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Still, it’s hard for me to think of Musk as having some masterplan to amplify these theories. His free speech absolutism naturally appeals to people eager to spew hate and, for whatever reason, he’s happy to engage with them.
Perhaps I’m naive, but when I read Musk admiring the physique of Gibson, I could almost take it at face value. I’d seen a version of this before, with a different antisemite.
You’ll recall a moment in December where Kanye West’s Twitter status was on the bubble. It was a real will-they-won’t-they for the billionaire class, with Twitter suspending Ye over “sleepy” antisemitic tweets, only for Musk to reinstate him and have to deal with the rapper’s increasingly erratic behavior and praise of Hitler. One of the last things Ye did before his forever ban was post an unflattering photo of Musk topless on a yacht in Mykonos.
Some thought this salvo was what led Musk to put the kibosh on Ye once and for all. But, Musk maintained it was in fact Ye’s posting an image of a swastika inside a Star of David that did it. The vacation photos didn’t upset the Chief Twit.
“Frankly, I found those pics to be helpful motivation to lose weight!” Musk said.
So, maybe Musk is willfully signal-boosting white nationalists. Maybe he’s actually impressed (or inspired) by Gibson’s biceps and took the rest of the message in stride. Likely, his intent is somewhere in between.
What Musk does next will be the true test of character: Will he try and find the name of Mad Max’s trainer or will he stay the course, blithely chatting with the worst people on his platform?
The choice is his, but if hating Jews is the key to a Charles Atlas body, Twitter would look a whole lot more like Muscle Beach.
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