The Trumpscum Jew Bleeding Hearts (2): Ben Shapiro Corrals the New Jewish Fascists to Give a Platform to Free Speech Grifter Anti-Semite Elon Musk
David Shasha
Elon Musk to join Ben Shapiro and other Jewish men for live chat on antisemitism and free speech
By: Philissa Cramer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Xj3tYFKks
https://www.foxnews.com/media/ben-shapiro-why-voting-trump-in-2020
Leaning into his latest controversies, Elon Musk is planning to join a bevy of Jewish men for a live chat on Thursday.
The conversation will focus on “X, anti-Semitism, and the future of free speech,” according to conservative pundit and social media personality Ben Shapiro, who announced Wednesday that Musk would join him on his “Daily Wire” podcast.
Also participating in the conversation, Shapiro said, are Rabbi Ari Lamm, an Orthodox scholar and podcaster; former Israeli politician and Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky; an unnamed representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an antisemitism watchdog; attorney and political commentator Alan Dershowitz; Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chair of the European Jewish Association; Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the author and onetime Republican congressional candidate; Rabbi Manis Friedman, a Chabad rabbi with a popular YouTube channel; former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin; and Asher Gold, and Israel-based publicist.
“And a Hava Nagila sing-off!” Musk tweeted as he shared Shapiro’s announcement.
The lineup drew applause from Shapiro’s fans on X. “This is gonna be awesome!” Libs of TikTok, a right-wing account operated by an Orthodox Jewish woman, posted.
It also elicited questions about why no women or progressives had been invited to the conversation. No non-Orthodox rabbis were on the list, either.
“Not 1 progressive voice. Not that I agree with them, but talking free speech w/o including them betrays the not-so-hidden agenda,” Andres Spokoiny, president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, tweeted. “And why not invite Greenblatt? I hope the great @AriLamm can be the voice of reason & moderation here.”
Spokoiny was referring to Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which Musk has attacked in a series of posts this month. Musk drew allegations of antisemitism after he threatened to sue the ADL, the antisemitism watchdog, for promoting an ad boycott that he said was causing massive financial loss to his business. The group had called for the boycott after Musk acquired the company and removed guardrails against hate speech. Amid his campaign against the nonprofit, Musk interacted with white supremacist accounts criticizing the ADL.
Greenblatt told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency earlier this month that he continued to view Musk as a “great innovator” who was unfortunately engaging with antisemites on the platform that he owns and renamed from Twitter.
More than 120 Jewish activists, largely on the left and center, this week called on advertisers and app stores to drop X over the hate speech that has spiked on the platform since Musk acquired it.
Musk himself has insisted that he is “pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind,” and X’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, recently posted a company statement rejecting antisemitism. Last week, Musk hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a live chat, during which Netanyahu praised his stated commitment to fighting antisemitism and encouraged him to continue fighting anti-Jewish bigotry.
From JTA, September 28, 2023
Ben Shapiro’s Book Is a Glib Rationale for Right-Wing Authoritarianism
By: Jonathan Chait
Like many conservative intellectuals, Ben Shapiro reacted to Donald Trump’s rise with horror, declaring, “ I will never vote for this man.” After Trump’s election, some of them drifted away from the Republican Party, while others plunged headlong into his cult. Shapiro joined the largest faction in undertaking what he probably regards as a sensible middle course. He has pared back his criticism to the barest form, and directed nearly all his considerable bile against Trump’s critics. Trump’s shortcomings are now a subordinate clause. All the real evil is done against him.
His new book, The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent, is painful evidence of these contortions. The book is the distilled evidence of anti-anti-Trumpism. Shapiro’s method is to confine his analysis narrowly to Trump’s enemies, as if there was nothing they were reacting against. Imagine a tightly framed film of a man hurling insults and abuse, looking like a maniac because his interlocutor is entirely offscreen, and you have a sense of Shapiro’s method. It is a political manifesto for a world in which Donald Trump barely exists.
Shapiro’s central argument is that the left is wrong to believe “the greatest threat to America’s future came from right-wing authoritarianism.” (I am one of the liberals he names who believes this.) Instead, he argues, “the most pressing authoritarian threat to the country” comes from the left’s control of academia, Hollywood, journalism, and corporate America.
Shapiro’s apparent intention to advance this bold thesis was to almost entirely ignore Trump’s four years of Nixonian abuses. The January 6 insurrection seems to have made this untenable, and Shapiro devotes a large chunk of his introduction to explaining that the storming of the Capitol, while regrettable, was a minor episode carried out by a few bad apples lacking any political support. “All Americans of goodwill — on all political sides — decried the January 6 riots,” he notes with satisfaction.
In fact, Trump has been insisting the riots were not riots at all, but a lovefest of hugging and kissing, while simultaneously laying the entire blame on the police for shooting Ashli Babbitt, whom he has turned into a martyr. Shapiro completely ignores Trump’s campaign (beginning long before the election) to depict any defeat as fraudulent, and likewise ignores the Republican decision to back off first impeaching him for his attempted autogolpe, and then even a bipartisan investigation.
The bulk of Shapiro’s argument that left authoritarianism is more dangerous than right authoritarianism is done by simply ignoring the latter category altogether. Shapiro has published rationales for Trump’s abuses of power before, but they are largely absent here. The formula is to argue x > y, then proceed to focus entirely on x.
That is not to say Shapiro’s one-sided indictment of the left is baseless. His book mainly consists of a chronicle of the illiberal left’s very real efforts to ideologically cleanse elite institutions. The list of horribles is pretty familiar: social-media mobs whipping up panics against the likes of David Shor, Donald McNeil, Gina Carano, and many others.
I know most of these episodes and have written about several of them. They are important markers of a disturbing cultural change, and too many liberals succumb to the temptation to justify or ignore these cases merely because they are exploited by people with bad motives, or because the right is worse. Of course, if you refuse to speak out against your own side’s abuses because the other side is worse, you are setting your standards at their level.
But within its narrow frame, Shapiro’s condemnation of the left suffers several enormous flaws. First, even while castigating the excesses and misfires of anti-racism, he barely engages with the reality of racism itself. Shapiro only concedes once, in passing, that racism continues to exist at all. He notably fails to acknowledge anywhere that the upsurge in (sometimes misguided) anti-racist activism might have anything to do with the fact that a man who routinely uttered racist comments was elected president of the United States.
Shapiro could still make a solid case that anti-racism often goes too far or attacks the wrong targets while acknowledging that Trump’s racism has contributed to it. Shapiro refuses to concede this. Instead, he argues, incredibly, that the left “began with a simple recognition” that conservatism had a weak point: its “militant insistence on cordiality.”
I would argue that a movement that has lionized figures like Joe McCarthy, Jesse Helms, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin before turning to Trump is not cursed with excessive belief in cordiality, let alone “militant” cordiality. Obviously Shapiro disagrees. But I can say with absolute confidence that nobody on the left believes conservatives are unusually cordial and that this weakness can be exploited. Like many of the sweeping characterizations Shapiro throws around, he does not bother to support this one with even a single example of a leftist believing the right’s Achilles’ heel is that they are too darn nice.
Second, Shapiro’s complete lack of introspection is even more pronounced on the principle of free speech. He is correct that progressives are often imposing illiberal speech norms on schools, companies, and cultural institutions. Yet he is unable to sustain even the illusion of supporting free speech norms on a principled basis. Shapiro keeps letting it slip that his actual complaint is these institutions are shutting down the wrong people. Shapiro attacks Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem, wistfully recalling how, in 1996, the NBA suspended Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf without pay for doing the same.
Trump publicly boasted that the NFL was blackballing Kaepernick because owners were afraid of being attacked by Trump if they signed him. This seems like a more precise comparison to the McCarthyist blacklist than any of the episodes Shapiro likens to the ’50s blackballing of communist screenwriters.
Shapiro doesn’t even mention it. In another odd aside, he argues that the 1960s Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was actually “authoritarian.” The students simply wanted power, and they seized university land and gave it over to … unregulated space for the exercise of free speech. You would think a book devoted to purportedly upholding liberal values would have the good sense to ixnay open longing to silence the left, but Shapiro lacks the ideological sophistication to keep up the pretense.
The most gaping hole in Shapiro’s argument is the fact that almost every example of genuine illiberalism he cites involves actors outside the Democratic Party. And while social-media mobs and Robin DiAngelo–style struggle sessions can do real harm to liberal norms, an actual authoritarian political formation needs to exercise government power.
Shapiro gets around this problem with his trademark cocktail of sweeping assertions unsupported by any evidence. The “Democratic party leadership has shifted from liberal to leftist,” he writes, a claim that would come as a surprise to both the Democratic Party’s leaders and any self-identified leftist. He repeatedly describes Barack Obama in hysterical terms: “Obama domesticated the destructive impulses of authoritarian leftism in pursuit of power … declaring himself the revolutionary representative of the dispossessed, empowered with the levers of the state in order to destroy and reconstitute the state on their behalf.” Obama also apparently claimed “all criticism” of his agenda was “actually racially motivated.” As usual, Shapiro treats these absurd characterizations as so self-evident that they require no proof.
The oddest thing about Shapiro’s effort to present Obama as the father of left-wing cancel culture is that Obama has denounced left-wing cancel culture repeatedly, publicly, and at length. “When I hear, for example, you know, folks on college campuses saying, ‘We’re not going to allow somebody to speak on our campus because we disagree with their ideas or we feel threatened by their ideas,’ you know, I think that’s a recipe for dogmatism,” he said. Obama has reiterated the theme many times, including here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
If there is some way to reconcile Shapiro’s assertion that left-wing political correctness has taken over the Democratic Party with the fact that the two-term Democratic president forcefully attacked political correctness, I can’t imagine what it is. As you might have guessed by this point, Shapiro’s way of dealing with this massive and seemingly fatal flaw in his argument is to ignore it completely.
Anti-anti-Trumpism is a simple game consisting of two steps. First, Trump’s authoritarianism must be ignored or, if that becomes impossible, downplayed (he was just joking, he was stopped in the end). And second, the flaws of the Democratic Party — which, like any party, consists of human beings subject to greed, stupidity, and other human failings — must be hysterically exaggerated. Thus, his naked racism and undisguised ambition to seize unelected power is enveloped in a protective layer of rationalization.
What Shapiro has amply demonstrated is that an aspiring authoritarian does not need all his supporters to enlist in his personality cult. It is enough that they simply go along and direct all their animus at the opposing party. The road to despotism is paved with hackery.
From New York magazine, August 12, 2021
Elon Musk Has Crossed a Line
By: David Austin Walsh
Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men who is now most famous for running the website X, formerly known as Twitter, has a new excuse for the company’s shaky performance since he bought it last year. The problem, according to Mr. Musk, is the Jews.
In an outburst on his platform on Monday, Mr. Musk claimed — without presenting any evidence — that ad revenues on Twitter are down 60 percent “primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL”— the Anti-Defamation League — which he said “has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.”
While the website has long had a reputation as a cesspool for lies, hate speech and a significant neo-Nazi user base, under a former chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, Twitter had begun to take steps to ban the most provocative and openly racist and antisemitic users. A 2018 report by the ADL noted that 4.2 million antisemitic tweets had been shared or re-shared on the platform in the previous year, before Twitter’s ban on extremist accounts took effect. Mr. Musk largely reversed those policies under the aegis of free speech. Thanks to the reinstatement of extremist accounts — and a new algorithm which prioritizes posts from “verified” users who have forked over $8 a month to the company — X/Twitter now functions as a bullhorn for the most toxic elements of the white nationalist right.
Mr. Musk also blamed a collapse in the company’s value — estimates place the company’s current worth at roughly one-third the $44 billion Mr. Musk paid for it — on the ADL, saying that he was considering legal action against the ADL and signaling that he supported banning the organization from X.
Mr. Musk insists that his claims are not antisemitic and that he harbors no animus toward the Jews; still, over the past week he has repeatedly launched personal attacks against the ADL head, Jonathan Greenblatt, accusing him of lying about the ADL’s political influence.
There is a long history of far-right groups attacking the ADL for its alleged “smears.” In the late 1950s Russell Maguire, the owner of the right-wing American Mercury magazine, claimed Jewish groups were falsely smearing him and his publication as antisemitic — and, like Mr. Musk, suggested they were organizing a boycott against him. A few years later, in the mid-1960s, Robert Welch, the leader of the far-right John Birch Society, similarly claimed that the ADL was unfairly smearing his organization’s reputation by alleging it was harboring anti-Semites in its ranks.
The ADL was certainly critical of both men — but for good reasons. Mr. Maguire was, in fact, a committed antisemite. He endorsed the authenticity of the infamous antisemitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his magazine. Mr. Welch, in large part due to pressure from the ADL, was forced to purge the John Birch Society of its most outspoken antisemites in 1966. Considering that Mr. Musk has reinstated and retweeted a number of openly antisemitic and white nationalist accounts since acquiring the website, his attacks on the ADL are very much in keeping with this tradition.
The Anti-Defamation League is not the only organization that monitors far-right speech, nor has it been alone in drawing Mr. Musk’s ire and that of the online far right on Twitter. The Southern Poverty Law Center, founded by civil rights activists in the 1970s, employs a bevy of researchers to monitor and catalog right-wing extremism and has long been the target of attacks by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and yet the S.P.L.C., a nonsectarian organization, has not been singled out by Mr. Musk.
Part of the reason is that the ADL, until relatively recently, was ambivalent — even supportive — of Mr. Musk. In 2022 Mr. Greenblatt of the ADL praised the billionaire entrepreneur. In comments on CNBC, Mr. Greenblatt called Mr. Musk an “amazing entrepreneur, an extraordinary innovator. He’s the Henry Ford of our time.”
Henry Ford, of course, became famous as the creative genius behind the Ford Motor Company. And, like Mr. Musk, Mr. Ford was a veritable celebrity. In the same way that Mr. Musk’s fanboys on Twitter gush about how his company SpaceX will lead humanity into a cosmic future, Mr. Ford was seen as the apostle of industrial modernity. Joseph Stalin sought out experts from the Ford Motor Company to help industrialize the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. Aldous Huxley dated the calendar in his 1932 dystopian novel “Brave New World” “A.F.” — “After Ford.”
Mr. Ford was also — next to Charles Lindbergh — one of America’s most infamous antisemites of the 20th century, and Mr. Greenblatt was pilloried by liberal and left-wing critics for failing to note this.
Despite Mr. Greenblatt’s tone-deaf lauding of Mr. Musk as the second coming of Henry Ford, the ADL has been justifiably concerned with monitoring Twitter as one of the major global forums for antisemitism since Mr. Musk’s takeover. Twitter’s historical free-for-all approach to speech, while it has allowed for previously marginalized voices to be major players in media narratives, has also allowed for new platforming opportunities for open antisemites and racists, hitherto confined to websites for true believers. Twitter was not the only social media platform to flirt with extremism — Facebook infamously became a vector of disinformation during the 2016 election — but it was unique in its power to shape media narratives.
What explains Mr. Musk’s questionable decision making? It does not take much of a leap to imagine that an immensely wealthy businessman — one who strongly believes in his own messianic mission to uplift humanity and who is facing intense and sustained public criticism over his politics and business acumen for the first time in decades — might conclude that nefarious forces are at work to undermine him. What separates this simple scapegoating from full-blown conspiracism is the sense one gets from Mr. Musk and his acolytes that criticism of him imperils the utopian future of mankind. That, combined with the fact that Mr. Musk has been consistently boosting far-right, white nationalist, and antisemitic accounts on Twitter since the beginning of his tenure, effectively melds his sense of victimhood with the conspiratorial antisemitism of the most toxic elements of the right.
X, née Twitter, despite losing significant value due to Mr. Musk’s incompetence and having to contend with rivals like Meta’s Threads, is still the most influential social media platform in shaping the national news narrative. As Kanye West, himself no stranger to making unhinged antisemitic statements, has said, “No one man should have all that power.”
The Republican Party already has a serious problem with some campaign staffers openly trafficking in antisemitic and white nationalist speech. Mr. Musk scapegoating the Jews for his own catastrophic business decisions regarding his management of one of the most influential social media platforms in the world will only add fuel to the fire.
David Austin Walsh (@DavidAstinWalsh) is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and author of the forthcoming book “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right.”
From The New York Times, September 11, 2023
Elon Musk’s dangerous tweets are empowering antisemites
By: Arsen Ostrovsky
Twitter was a cesspool of antisemitic hatred and vitriol long before Elon Musk took over. But now, under his leadership, the newly renamed platform, X, has become an unrestrained free-for-all against Jews, where neo-Nazis and white extremists seemingly run rampant and antisemitism is widespread.
Research shows that since the company’s takeover by Musk in October 2022, the volume of English-language antisemitic tweets has more than doubled.
Just look at the events of the past week and Musk’s involvement in a coordinated campaign by white nationalists and far-right extremists on X to #BantheADL, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), one of the most prominent global organizations combating antisemitism and racial hatred.
On Saturday, Musk asked his 155 million followers whether he should run a poll to ban the group, in response to what he perceived was an attempt by ADL to censor users on his platform and pressure companies to stop advertising.
Up to that point, the #BantheADL campaign was hardly noticeable, relegated mostly to a small fringe of extremists. But Musk got involved when he “liked” a tweet by Keith Woods, an Irish white nationalist and self-proclaimed “raging anti-semite,” who was one of the lead initiators of the campaign.
Musk then further engaged with Woods, directly replying to him that “ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter” and posting a flood of tweets on his perceived grievances with ADL. In doing so, the hashtag immediately become the top trending topic on X.
Like clockwork, it opened the floodgates of posts on X, featuring antisemitic tropes, stereotypes, caricatures and neo-Nazi conspiracies of global Jewish domination, Zionist attempts to disrupt established societies and immediate threats posed to “white people.”
For the record, the ADL is not beyond reproach; a number of its policies are certainly worthy of question. However, the ADL has long been used by the far-right as some kind of Jewish bogeyman. Ultimately, the ADL is just a figurehead for the neo-Nazis in their ultimate goal to eliminate and cancel Jews altogether.
Had Musk not elevated the “Ban the ADL” campaign, it is questionable whether anyone would have really noticed it. However, in putting himself at the center of the campaign, he sent it into antisemitic orbit, bringing out of the woodwork many far-right, neo-Nazi, conspiracy theorist crackpots.
Now, Musk has threatened to sue the ADL for defamation — quite ironic for someone who professes to be a “free speech absolutist.” In announcing his intent to take legal action, Musk has claimed that since his acquisition of Twitter, the ADL “has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic” and that as a result, “US advertising revenue is still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by ADL.” Musk has valued the alleged loss at roughly $22 billion.
However, one can’t help but wonder, is Musk using ADL as a scapegoat to cover for his own business woes? According to some reports, X was already heavily laden in debt, and with the U.S. experiencing an economic slowdown advertisers tend to pull back. Musk has also gone on a firing spree after taking over, with a lower expenditure meaning the platform requires less revenue to meet costs.
But by opening up X as a megaphone for extremists pushing hateful material, it is plausible that advertisers have decided they just no longer wish to be associated with the platform. Only last month, two leading brands suspended advertising on X after their ads appeared next to pro-Nazi content.
Perhaps instead of blaming ADL for all his company’s ills and using an identifiably Jewish organization as a scapegoat, Musk should focus on getting back to business basics.
In the wake of the ADL fall-out, Musk reiterated “To be super clear, I’m pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind.” Musk might not be an antisemite. But he is elevating and empowering antisemites by repeatedly engaging with white extremists with antisemitism already at record highs in the U.S. If history has taught us anything, it is that unchecked hatred and incitement against Jews has real-life implications and leads directly to violence.
If Musk truly wants to maintain X as a free speech platform and demonstrate he is against antisemitism, he needs to stop engaging with antisemites.
Arsen Ostrovsky is a human rights attorney and CEO of The International Legal Forum, a global network of lawyers combating antisemitism. You can follow him on Twitter at: @Ostrov_A.
From The Hill, September 9, 2023