What less-than-good things are happening in the world of Elon Musk and Twitter (well, X) of late that the Media Research Center doesn’t want to talk about?
- The AI chatbot Musk launched in X, Grok, is purportedly “anti-woke,” but it endorses diversity, thinks Musk should treat his employees better and admitted that he promoted hate speech by endorsing an anti-Semitic tweet.
- Politicians are calling Musk out for blaming Tesla drivers for things that go wrong with Teslas that are actually Tesla’s fault.
- After an incoherent and erratic performance during a Tesla board meeting, Musk tried to deny he was on drugs (despite his history of using same).
- Musk had another round of suspending the Twitter accounts of people who have criticized him and fellow billionaire Bill Ackman. Most of the accounts were restored after enough people complained.
- Musk pushed the racist idea that an incident in which a door fell off a Boeing aircraft during flight was caused by diversity efforts at the company.
The MRC did, however, cheer Musk endorsing right-wing talking points. Tierin-Rose Mandelburg gushed in a Jan. 18 post:
In a nation and specifically a city that makes it their goal to kill babies through abortion, this is iconic.
The pro-life diaper brand EveryLife set up a billboard ad in Times Square recently that read “Make More Babies.” To be even more savage, the company used one of Elon Musk’s tweets that read, “Having children is saving the world.” Though Musk didn’t have anything to do with the collaboration for the billboard, he, along with many others, endorsed the message.
Truly iconic marketing right here.
The ad ran for 30 minutes straight on Wednesday and is scheduled to be displayed sporadically throughout the rest of the week and weekend.
[…]In response to seeing the billboard, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said, “I had nothing to do with this billboard, but I definitely endorse the message!”
His response gained tons of users’ and outlets’ support.
Mandelburg didn’t mention that Musk has 11 children by at least three different women — or that, as a very rich dude, Musk can afford to do so. Some of those children were conceived using IVF, which some right-wingers do not approve of.
A Jan. 23 post by Tom Olohan touted Musk spouting more right-wing talking points:
X owner Elon Musk made clear that the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda is a source of hatred and racism.
During a conversation with The Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro at the January 2024 European Jewish Association Delegation to Auschwitz, Musk connected anti-Semitic campus protests to DEI initiatives. Musk told Shapiro that diversity, equity, and inclusion “all sound like nice words, but what it really means is discrimination on the basis of race, sex and sexual orientation and it’s against merit and thus I think it’s fundamentally anti-Semitic.”
Earlier in the discussion, Shapiro went after the “conspiracy theory about power” that underlies anti-Semitism and the DEI agenda: the demonization of a group as an “oppressor class” over the rest of society. Shapiro called this conspiracy theory “really ugly” and added that he saw “echoes” of this theory in the present. “We see the diversity equity and inclusion ideology that basically suggests that all of society is a vast pyramid of group identity and that at the very top are the people who are successful and that those people are exploiting everybody else,” Shapiro said. “You can tell who is successful by their group identity not by their level of success, by their group identity. That matches up incredibly, that syncs up almost a Venn diagram circle with anti-Semitism.”
[…]Musk panned the absurdity of coddling people who want “to kill you.” He added, “I’m a great believer in moral absolutism, not moral relativism. There is good and bad in the absolute and you judge any group and individual against absolute moral standards — not whether they’re the so-called ‘oppressed’ or ‘oppressor’— just on absolute moral terms: ‘Are they doing good things? Do they want to murder innocent people?’ That’s bad. It doesn’t matter who they are.”
Olohan didn’t mention that Musk was making a highly publicized visit to Auschwitz because he had been busted a couple months earlier endorsing an anti-Semitic tweet (which the MRC was loath to talk about) and, before that, lashing out at the ADL for pointing all the anti-Semitism on Twitter/X. In other words, this was an image rehab trip, not really a genuine expression of solidarity by Musk.