Elon Musk says he’ll reinstate antisemite Nick Fuentes to X: ‘It is better to have anti whatever out in the open’
As of early Friday morning eastern U.S. time, Fuentes’ account remained suspended

Over 100 Jewish organizations have signed onto an open letter denouncing a rise in antisemitic speech on Twitter under Elon Musk’s ownership. Graphic by Grace Yagel
(JTA) — Elon Musk says he will restore the X account of Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust denier and antisemite who has said “perfidious Jews” should be executed.
“Very well, he will be reinstated, provided he does not violate the law, and let him be crushed by the comments and Community Notes,” Musk said Thursday on the social media platform he bought in 2022 and renamed from Twitter. “It is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted than grow simmering in the darkness.”
Musk was responding to a plea on the platform from a user whose name, GoyaBeanGroyper, explicitly indicates his affiliation with Fuentes and his brand of Christian nationalism. As of Friday morning, Fuentes’ account remained suspended.
Hate speech watchdogs have consistently advocated for deplatforming extremists to diminish their reach. Many argue that rebuttals to hate speech on social media rarely have the intended effect and often end up amplifying the offensive postings.
Musk, who says he is committed to absolute free speech but who has suspended accounts of journalists whose reporting has upset him, returned Fuentes to Twitter for a day in January 2023. Fuentes flooded his feed with antisemitic commentary and within a day his account was suspended again, without comment from the company.
Musk said in exchanges on Thursday with acolytes that he would be a hypocrite to keep suppressing Fuentes.
“I cannot claim to be a defender of free speech, but then permanently ban someone who hasn’t violated the law, no matter how much I disagree with what they say,” said Musk, who has sued or threatened to sue watchdogs that track the proliferation of hate speech since he purchased the platform. “This will probably cause us to lose a lot of advertisers and makes me sad, but a principle is a principle.”
The Anti-Defamation League, one of the watchdogs Musk has threatened to sue, has also praised him for saying he would ban two phrases common to pro-Palestinian protests — “decolonization,” and “from the river to the sea”
Musk’s free speech commitments remain inconsistent: The same day the said he would restore Fuentes, he proposed deporting people who remove the American flag and fly another in its place.
Fuentes is a Holocaust denier who first gained prominence after participating in the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017. He was banned from Twitter in July 2021, amid the platform’s crackdown on far-right extremists, particularly in the wake of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He burst back onto the public stage in November 2022, when he and Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, had dinner with former President Donald Trump shortly after Ye embarked on an antisemitic spree on social media and in interviews.
Despite his Twitter ban, Fuentes has maintained his following through a livestream and other direct communications. In December, Fuentes said that “evildoers” need to be “given the death penalty” straight up when “we take power.” Among “evildoers” he named “perfidious Jews.”
“These people that are suppressing the name Christ and suppressing Christianity, they must be absolutely annihilated when we take power,” Fuentes said on his podcast.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
In Case You Missed It
-
News Who would protect New York Jews better? Cuomo and Lander trade attacks on the campaign trail
-
News Rabbis revolt over LGBTQ+ club, exposing fight over queer acceptance at Yeshiva University
-
Opinion In Qatargate fiasco, Netanyahu’s ‘witch hunt’ narrative takes cues from Trump
-
Yiddish די הגדה ווי אַ לעבעדיקער דענקמאָל פֿון אַשכּנזישער פּאָעזיעThe Haggadah as a living monument to Ashkenazi poetry
אַמאָל זענען די פּייטנים, מיסטישע דיכטער־וויזיאָנערן, געווען אויבן־אָן בײַ די פֿראַנצויזישע און דײַטשישע ייִדן.
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.