FREE BONUS: Jack Talks About Elon Musk and the Nazis
Just Jack, talking about Elon Musk, X/Twitter, the nazis, and where we are now. Content Warnings. This episode is largely based on the work of Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket. Great stuff. Go, read, subscribe. https://thehandbasket.substack.com/p/elon-musk-is-an-antisemite https://thehandbasket.substack.com/p/elon-musk-crosses-the-border-to-nazi Also based on the work of Ben Collins: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/was-elon-musks-strategy-twitter-rcna118490 Also quoted: https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/white-nationalists-adopt-clowns-as-their-next-racist-symbol-yes-seriously/ Daniel's episode about Musk with Eric from ESGHound: I Don't Speak German: UNLOCKED! Bonus Ep22 Elon Musk and Twitter, with Eric from ESG Hound (libsyn.com) Become a backer of Daniel or Jack to get exclusive access to a new bonus episode. Becoming a patron also brings access to all other bonus episodes. At least one new Patreon exclusive bonus episode every month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
At 3.12pm on October 2nd, 2023, so just a few days ago at the time of recording, Elon Musk tweeted, exted, geted, shitted, I don't know, posted on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, a tweet that was just a clown emoji and a globe emoji.
Now, I'm going to briefly read from an article at Right Wing Watch from 2019 called White Nationalists Adopt Clowns as Their Next Racist Symbol.
Brackets yes, seriously.
Link below.
And as I read this, I will be brief, but as I read this, people who've been listening to this podcast for a while will recognise a lot of the things that I'm about to talk about, that this article talks about.
Because they are things that we have talked about on this podcast, that Daniel has reported on in this podcast.
We've talked about the clown emoji.
The clown meme.
So, most of you regular listeners, you know what this is about, but just for the sake of it, I'm reading now.
The clown render of Pepe the Frog, which know your meme researchers have identified as being known as Honk Honk, or Honkler, began spreading across the internet last year, so that'd be 2018, time of this article, In recent months the meme has gained a foothold in the far right.
Blah blah blah.
A clown emoji and a globe emoji.
That's exactly what Elon Musk just tweeted.
A clown emoji and a globe emoji together has been used to convey the phrase clown world.
The phrase and accompanying emojis unify far-right social media users in their exasperation over an imagined state of collapse in the Western Hemisphere that they largely blame on immigrants and minority groups.
We know this.
Honkler and Clown World memes We're recently incorporated into Goey Talk, a new but growing web-based, new at the time, new but growing web-based white nationalist podcast.
The show's hosts advocate white nationalism, nihilistic attitude, white nationalist, white supremacist movements in the United States, conveyed in the repetition of the phrase clown world.
Goey Talk hosts express racist, antisemitic views as a staple.
Guests include David Duke, Christopher Cantwell, Patrick Little.
They are ultimately nihilistic about the state of the world, Their ability to change it without mass organised action reminiscent of the violent writings of James Mason in his book Siege.
So, as I say, regular listeners, you'll have heard us talk about most of that.
So why am I doing this?
Well firstly, my apologies that it's just me, just Jack, talking to you.
No Daniel, no discussion, no great guest.
I did think about inviting a guest for this, but I wanted to get it out as soon as possible.
I'm doing this because I think this is an important issue.
This is about Elon Musk and where we are with Elon Musk.
I've left Twitter, or X, or whatever you call it now.
I can't be on that site anymore.
This isn't about me, but that's how I feel.
And I'm on Blue Sky now.
But I said on Blue Sky just the other day, Elon Musk advocates the Great Replacement Theory, which is just white genocide.
In code, in jokes, in... Oh, that's interesting.
Underneath tweets that advocate it.
That kind of slimy stuff.
But he does.
He advocates the Soros conspiracy theory, which as we know is just like White Genocide is encoded in Great Replacement, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and all that, that's all encoded in the Soros thing.
Just as Kultur Bolshevismus is encoded in Cultural Marxism.
He advocates all this, again in that slimy indirect way, but he does.
What do we call somebody that does that?
This is one of the richest men in the world.
This man has direct influence over American government policy.
This man is integrated into the United States Defense Department.
This man damaged Ukraine's war effort against the invader, the Russian invader, with his Starlink program, keeping it unavailable for them at a crucial moment.
What do we say about somebody like this?
I want to again read to you.
This episode is really just going to be me talking about other people's work, other people's research, other people's writing.
There's not much original here.
So I'm going to read to you from an article called, What was Elon Musk's strategy for Twitter?
This is by Ben Collins at NBC News.
You know, mainstream media.
Yeah, I know.
This is still a good report, I think.
On the day that public records revealed that Elon Musk had become Twitter's biggest shareholder, an unknown sender texted the billionaire and recommended an article imploring him to acquire the social network outright.
Now, I'm going to chop and change this article around a bit to make my point clearer.
And I'm leaving loads out, obviously.
So go and read that Right Wing Watch article about the clown meme.
Go and read this.
Go and read all the things I'm going to quote from in this podcast.
The wording of the texts matches the subtitles of the article, The Battle of the Century, Here's What Happens If Elon Musk Buys Twitter, which had been published three days earlier on the right-wing website Revolver.News.
The site is run by the far-right blogger Darren Beatty, a former Trump White House speechwriter who was fired in 2018 for having spoken on a panel alongside white nationalists.
For the optics, obviously.
Not from ideological disapproval.
Back in 2016 or 2018, when they still faintly cared about people seeing connections between them.
The Trump campaign, that is.
Connections between them and the far right.
After the January 6th attack 2021 on the Capitol, which was an attempt at a fascist coup, let me remind you, Beatty promoted the baseless claim that the FBI planted agents.
It's the whole Fed conspiracy theory thing.
Beatty's political career appeared to be over when he was fired from his White House role as speechwriter for Trump in 2018.
His removal came after CNN revealed he had spoken on a panel alongside Peter Brimelow.
Founder of white nationalist website VDARE.
Again, listeners will recognise this stuff from us, from other sources.
You know what this is.
Beatty worked for White House head of speechwriting Vince Haley, Trump adviser Stephen Miller, 2019 hired a speechwriter by Representative Matt Gaetz.
Currently up to all sorts of shenanigans.
And the Trump administration rehired him shortly after Trump lost the 2020 election.
Another bit of this article.
As I say, I'm chopping it around a bit.
Musk's purchase of Twitter, the anonymous article said, would amount to a, quote, declaration of war against the globalist American empire.
Now again, we know what that means.
The sender of the texts was offering Musk a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter.
Since then, many of the decisions Musk made after he bought Twitter appear to have closely followed this roadmap, up to and including his ongoing attacks against the Anti-Defamation League, a non-profit organisation founded by Jewish Americans to counter discrimination.
It's possible that you, listener, like me, might have your reservations about the ADL.
I'm going to touch upon that a bit later.
It's not the point at this juncture.
Back to the article.
The text messages described a series of actions Musk should take after he gained full control of the social media platform.
Step 1.
Quoting.
Step 1.
Blame the platform for its users.
Step 2.
Coordinated pressure campaign.
Step 3.
Exodus of the blue checks.
Step 4.
Deplatforming.
Messages from the Unknown Sender were revealed in a court filing last year as evidence in a lawsuit Twitter brought against Musk after he tried to back out of buying it.
The anonymous story, that's the story on Revolver News, published by Beatty, it's not saying he wrote it, we don't know who sent the texts, but the story on the website describes how Beatty repeatedly attacks the Anti-Defamation League, calls the ADL a danger to Musk's ownership, and said it was one of several, quote, powerful left-wing activist groups that had, quote, besieged Twitter before Musk bought it.
The article then expressed sympathy for the Russian government-controlled news outlets Russia Today and Sputnik, saying they'd been unfairly cancelled after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Musk ended the use of state-sponsored media labels on Twitter this year, dropping it from the accounts of Russia Today, Sputnik and many other state-owned organisations.
Musk's one-man war against the war against disinformation.
That's me.
Back to the article.
Beattie's presentation of ideas that appeared to be adopted by Musk continued after his website published the anonymous April 2022 article.
The day after Musk's official October 2022 takeover of Twitter, Beattie appeared on the podcast of Steve Bannon, Trump White House chief strategist, and called for Musk to make internal emails from Twitter management public.
What happened November 2022?
The Twitter files.
September 4th.
This gone.
Musk threatened to sue the ADL, claiming, without providing evidence, that US ad revenues were down 60% primarily due to pressure on advertisers by at ADL.
The same week the hashtag, hashtag ban the ADL, pushed in part by white nationalists, Of course, he's let them all back on, trended on Twitter, and Musk tweeted that the ADL has tried very hard to strangle X-Strokes Twitter.
On the same day, Musk blamed the ADL for causing antisemitism.
Classic antisemitic trope, of course.
You will go and watch the old videos of his speeches.
You will see David Irving saying this.
Why do the Jews never wonder why they're so unpopular?
Everywhere they go people hate them.
They never ask themselves if it's their fault.
Classic anti-Semitic trope.
The Jews... Anti-Semitism's their fault.
Quoting Musk now.
Back to the article quoting Musk.
The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform!
Exclamation mark.
Four days later, Musk posted a meme with the caption, Drop the anti, just Defamation League, it's cleaner.
That seems to me like Elon is directly following this playbook.
More or less directly following a playbook.
That he was sent from, essentially, fascists, white nationalists.
And it certainly looks like that, doesn't it?
I want to quote now from a couple of articles written by Marissa Cabas.
Marissa, listeners will remember, was on this show, very kindly agreed to come on as a guest last year to chat with me about George Santos.
I've been following Marissa's career.
I think she's really good.
She's turning into something of a breakout star on Blue Sky, where I am now, social media.
It's great stuff.
Again, I'm going to quote from these articles, this is her work.
It's not my work, it's her work.
I'm not going to quote most of what she's written.
Most of it, you should go and read the articles.
Go there, to her substack.
It's called the Handbasket.
Handbasketsubstack.com.
Again, links below.
Links in the show notes.
Here's the text of tweets from Musk that are quoted in this article.
Since the acquisition, the at ADL has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it and me of being anti-semitic.
Next tweet.
Our US advertising revenue is still down 60% primarily due to pressure on advertisers by at ADL.
That's what advertisers tell us in brackets.
So they almost succeeded in killing X slash Twitter.
So the fact that he's run this platform into the ground through being a ludicrously bad businessman.
And I think we've just seen, haven't we, from that previous article.
It's not just that he's a ludicrously bad businessman.
He is.
Farcically bad at this.
But it's also that he is not just in this to do business.
He is in this for ideological reasons.
I said this right the way back when this whole Musk-buying... I'm not doing it, I was right after all.
But I said this back when this whole Musk-buying Twitter thing started.
Yeah, he's fallen into it bass-ackwards.
But also, this guy's pilled.
And he wants to use this.
He wants to use this platform as a platform from which he can do activism, from which he can proselytise.
From which he can change the world, he can manipulate the media and political environment using this, in the furtherance of his new faith.
Because he's pilled.
He does this, runs his own site into the ground, nearly.
It's the ADL's fault.
Because they point out the anti-semitism that is now rife on Twitter because he's been destroying any kind of content moderation, letting back all the banned right-wing extremists and fascists and white nationalists.
And then for that criticism, they're to blame for the site going down.
Anyway, I'm now going to actually start quoting from Marissa's article.
This article is called Elon Musk is an antisemite.
It's refreshing that somebody just says it.
You know, I love this because somebody just says it.
Okay, here's from the article.
The billionaire's antisemitism has been building for some time now.
But with his encouragement over the weekend of the Twitter hashtag, hashtag ban the ADL, the non-profit anti-defamation league whose work centres on combating anti-Semitism, Musk has quadrupled down on his white supremacist sympathies that have pervaded Twitter since his takeover.
And now he's actively threatening to sue the ADL because of an erroneous, unquantifiable claim that somehow the organisation's calls for the Twitter CEO to regulate hate speech resulted in a 60% reduction in advertising revenue.
And now prominent white nationalists are celebrating.
And then Marissa has a tweet quoted in the article from Andrew Torba.
Again, listeners of this show, you know who that is.
Founder of Gab.
The guy that created Twitter for Nazis, essentially, which is now redundant.
Torba's tweet is, in under five years we went from having every single one of our guys banned from the big tech platforms to the richest man in the world noticing, naming and waging total war on our largest enemy while running one of those platforms.
Let that sink in.
Keep the faith.
We are winning.
That's from the 9th of April this year.
OK, back to, back to Marissa's article.
Musk's antisemitism has gone into overdrive the past few months.
In May he launched an attack on Holocaust survivor and billionaire philanthropist George Soros saying, quote, he wants to erode the very fabric of civilization Soros hates humanity.
What is that?
We know what that is.
Again, Marissa.
In July, a pair of European organisations took legal action against Musk's Twitter for failure to remove explicitly anti-Semitic tweets.
Quote, four of the tweets denied the Holocaust in explicit terms.
One said blacks should be gassed and sent with SpaceX to Mars, according to The Guardian.
while a sixth compared Covid vaccination programs to mass extermination in Nazi death camps.
All were reported in January, but Twitter ruled that three of the tweets did not violate its guidelines and failed to respond to the other reports.
The legal action claims, unquote, that was the Guardian.
Back to Marissa.
The Guardian also shared these alarming statistics.
Quoting the Guardian, analysts detected 325,739 English-language anti-Semitic tweets in the nine months from June 22 to February 23, with the average weekly number of anti-Semitic tweets increasing by 106% when comparing the period before and after Musk's acquisition.
The rate of creation of anti-Semitic accounts More than tripled in the period after Musk's takeover.
OK, unquoting the Guardian, back to Marissa.
Musk is such a rabid anti-Semite that the Forward, the Jewish media outlet, has a running list of all the anti-Semitic things he's said going back as far as 2018.
Because again, this isn't new.
The current form of it, yeah, but anti-Semitism in itself, this is not new for Elon.
Back to Marissa.
The list includes Musk's reinstatement of Kanye West's account after the anti-Semitic rapper was suspended for inciting violence by tweeting a photo of a swastika combined with a Star of David.
It also mentions how a former Twitter employee who is Jewish was forced to flee his home because of anti-Semitic threats, sparked by Musk publicly implying that he supported paedophilia.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
We know who that was.
That was Yoel Roth.
Musk's just been tweeting about how he's supposedly this inhuman monster.
Evil, dangerous, inhuman monster.
Can't let go of it.
Back to Marissa.
And we can't forget the time he tweeted a quote from Neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom that's often misattributed to Voltaire.
Again, you listen to this show, you know what that is.
That's to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise.
Voltaire.
Wasn't Voltaire.
It was Neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom.
Quoting Marissa.
To be clear, the ADL is itself a flawed organisation.
This is great, this is important this to be said.
One of their core values is that any criticism of Israel is equal to antisemitism.
In a report they released this past April, the ADL wrote some, quoting the ADL, some anti-Israel activists and ideologues who would normally recoil from overt antisemitism may incorporate classic antisemitic themes into their attacks on Israel and its supporters.
Unquote.
Now, I think that's true.
The trouble with the ADL is that they interpret pretty much all criticism of Israel in those terms.
That's me.
Back to Marissa.
As an organisation they often equate right-wing antisemitism with progressive criticism of Israel's leadership and policy, and balk at the assertion that Israel's subjugation of Palestinians constitutes an apartheid state.
In fact, I've read their stuff.
They explicitly say that calling Israel an apartheid state, which is objectively true, is antisemitic, which it's not.
Back to Marissa.
But we can hold two things true at once.
The ADL is not representative of all American Jews, and Elon Musk is an anti-Semite who's singling out the organisation as a stand-in for all of us.
That's perfect.
It's so important that we said, and that's correct.
And I'm now going to quote from another article of Marissa's, again, at the Handbasket sub-stack.
Go there, read it, subscribe, read her stuff.
She's great.
This is her work, not mine.
I'm quoting her.
It was another banner week for Musk.
This is a more recent article.
This is another banner week for Musk.
He dressed up as a cowboy with his hat on backwards and went to the US southern border to pretend he understood immigration policy.
After taking aim at people attempting to migrate to our country, he took to Twitter to talk about the banal things he learned from his border jaunt and then took a hard right turn into German politics.
Even for him it was shocking.
Musk shared a post from another account Friday morning criticising German NGOs, non-government organisations, for providing ships to rescue African migrants unsafely crossing the Mediterranean to Italy.
Quoting the post, these NGOs are subsidised by the German government.
Let's hope AFD wins the elections to stop this European suicide, the account wrote.
What's AFD?
Alternative for Deutschland.
It's the far right in Germany.
If another brilliant former guest of the show, Annika Brockschmidt, was here, she could tell you all about that.
In fact, I think she did talk about that a little bit on the show that she came on to do.
Musk shared that post, then added his own commentary, asking, Is the German public aware of this?
The German Foreign Office responded, yes, and it's called Saving Lives.
Seven hours later, Musk shot back, so you're actually proud of it?
Interesting.
Frankly, I doubt that a majority of the German public supports this.
Have you run a poll?
Surely it is a violation of the sovereignty of Italy for Germany to transport... I can't even fucking read it.
Has invasion vibes.
Germany's transporting numbers of illegal immigrants to Italian soil.
Has invasion vibes.
So that second article from Marissa is called Elon Musk crosses the border to Nazi.
And you know, I think that's right.
If it walks like a Nazi and it talks like a Nazi, if it advocates white genocide theory and protocols of Zion via Soros paranoia and cultural Marxism, if it tacitly or indirectly supports the AFD, Alternative for Deutschland in Germany.
Explicitly a far right fascist organisation.
Describes immigrants, African immigrants being saved from drowning and then dropped off safely on Italian shores.
Describes that as invasion.
What is that?
That's the camp of the saints.
So I think Marissa's absolutely right, and I think it's really valuable that she's saying this.
Again, go and read her stuff, subscribe to her sub stack, she's great.
Go and read all these things that I've read from, because again, this is other people's research.
I don't know, people.
If you listen to this show, chances are you're not a fan of Elon Musk, you know?
You probably weren't a big admirer of Elon Musk going in, you know?
A lot of you listening to this are probably thinking, you know, Jack Old News, where have you been?
I just think we need to be talking about this.
I think we need to be aware of the fact, and we need to be talking about the fact.
I humbly submit that we need to be talking about the fact that one of the richest men in the world, one of the most powerful men in the world… Incidentally, what a system that allows somebody as monumentally incompetent and foolish as Elon Musk to wield this kind of power.
One of the most rich and powerful and influential men in the world, a man who is partly integrated with the most powerful army in the world, who is having a direct impact on whether Ukrainians can fight for their freedom against the Russian invasion.
The man who owns the most significant social media platform and is now running it as essentially a Nazi Chan board.
He is basically a Nazi.
Has he read Mein Kampf?
Does he subscribe to the doctrines of Carl Schmitt?
I don't think so.
That's not the point.
Nazism is actually an intellectual doctrine.
If you want to see what Nazism actually is, I've just read it to you.
And he's not just in ideological sympathy with these people.
He's not just one of them.
Apparently he's, looks like to me anyway from Ben Collins' report, he's actively taking direction, or at least advice, on how to run the world's most significant social media company that he owns, to how to use it as an ideological weapon.
That's where we are now.
So that's really all I wanted to talk about.
Thanks for listening.
If you have listened, if you've gotten all the way through, that's great.
Thank you very much.
I know it's, it's just me talking at you.
No conversation, no Daniel, no guest.
It's a bit rough, but I wanted to do this because I think this is really, really, really fucking scary.
As my friend Kit says, this is not a drill.
And again, if you're a regular listener, you know this.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't keep saying it.
Okay, so I'm going to check out now.
Thanks for listening.
I know I keep saying this, but I Don't Speak German is on its way back.
It's been a while now, but we are coming back, both of us.
