X (Twitter) Is Now A Welcoming, Safe Space For All Of The World's Antisemites & Nazi-Lovers

Musk has reinstated the accounts of antisemites, given his approval to every possible anti-Jewish trope and conspiracy, and wants to sue the ADL because of his own comically inept business decisions.

Elon “Free-Speech Absolutist” Musk’s reinstatement (and subsequent promotion of) some of Twitter’s most vile antisemitic accounts reached a new high (i.e., low) point in the past week with his campaign of revenge against the Anti-Defamation League.

As The Daily Beast reported on September 2:

The initial impetus behind the campaign appears to be a meeting ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt had with Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino about addressing the rampant hate speech on the site. After Greenblatt tweeted about their “very frank + productive conversation,” a number of prominent right-wing accounts pushed the hashtag #BanTheADL while claiming the group was stifling free speech.

Musk eventually engaged with Keith Woods, a YouTuber with connections to notorious white supremacists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. Besides liking a post in which Woods said the ADL is “financially blackmailing social media companies into removing free speech on their platform,” Musk also replied that the “ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter.”

Musk has boosted and promoted the hashtag and is considering a lawsuit against the ADL because ad revenue at the flaming dumpster trainwreck shitpile that Xitter has become is down 60%. (I believe Xitter is pronounced “shitter”.) As Mike Rothschild (no relation), the author of the just-published Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, wrote yesterday:

I love the implication that the erratic management, mass layoffs, incoherent moderation, destruction of verification, decimated engineering staff, serial unbanning of racists, and crumbling infrastructure had nothing to do with twitter losing half its value. Nope, just Jews.

Claire Berlinski is a journalist and author (of both non-fiction and fiction). She attended Oxford University, where she received a degree in modern history and her doctorate in international relations. She has been published in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Asia Times, the Globe and Mail, and numerous other venues, and is currently the editor-in-chief of The Cosmopilitan Globalist, which draws on the knowledge and expertise of a world-spanning group of 68 writers and analysts.

Our aim is to offer educated, erudite, and credible reporting and analysis from the world around, treating issues of genuinely global import. We also host regular debates and podcasts, and we offer our readers a forum to discuss these issues with us and each other.

We strive to provide world-class coverage of consequential events even as we consider every issue from an informed local perspective. Our writers live in the countries from which they report. They understand local politics intimately.

We seek insight from academia and other experts. We value expertise. But we don’t worship it. . . . We don’t chase breaking news. It breaks, we shrug. We strive, instead, to be more intelligent, reflective, astute, and accurate than any other publication.

That comes from CG’s lengthy “About” page, which among other functions serves as a fantastic history lesson regarding the almost-complete disappearance of international news from the relative handful of American newspapers that have survived the steady destruction of the industry over the past 40+ years.

Berlinski writes about Xitter and directs a few questions at its CEO Linda Yaccarino. Indeed, the column is headlined: “Dear Linda Yaccarino”. She opens by stating she was not going to write about this subject because she assumed it would be headline news everywhere. Instead, it was more or less nowhere. She quotes from Rolling Stone and The Forward, stating that they “seem to be the only publications in the US that wrote about it”. A few more — possibly not online until after she posted her essay — were mentioned in the comments.

In her open letter to Yaccarino, Berlinski agrees with The Forward that Musk is currently “the most dangerous antisemite in America” and she describes his “ban the ADL” mission

one of the most vile public outpourings of antisemitism in all of American history. Since the founding. I’m serious. I’ve never seen anything like it. That stuff is straight out of Der Stürmer, and since I have a suspicion you won’t know what that was, that’s straight-up Nazi pornography: it’s Third Reich filth—and it was trending for days, even making it to the top of the trending list. . . .

The company formerly known as Twitter is now—undeniably—a wholly antisemitic entity. A magnet for every Jew-hater in the world. A place they can call home. It’s their safe space. . . . [A]ntisemitism might be X’s whole raison d'être.

Back in November 2022, Berlinski expresses her amazement at Twitter and what it offered to (some of) the world.

For all critics’ affected cynicism, the truth is that Twitter is astonishing: Humanity has never before had a giant, live, pulsating representation of everyone’s thoughts, at every second of the day, everywhere. It’s not just a locus of idiocy and propaganda. It’s a fantastic display of human creativity and wit, a massive, intelligent organism. Its uses are limitless. If you can’t see its astonishing value, you lack imagination. Where else can you think through any problem you care to think about with the help of millions of other people, whenever you want?

You can use it to find and speak to almost anyone you wish—anywhere. Do you need a piano tuner in Chicago? Advice about why your washing machine made a terrible noise? A Congolese parliamentarian to explain the Kivu conflict? Twitter lets you strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone, no matter how elevated his station or remote his location; you need no introduction, no intermediary, to speak to anyone you please . . .

I question whether anyone could think through an existing problem with “millions of other people” at any time, let alone “whenever you want” — although admittedly, on Twitter, it was always 3:00 p.m. somewhere. Nevertheless, she’s not wrong in calling it “a fantastic display of human creativity and wit, a massive, intelligent organism”. As far as “a giant, live, pulsating representation of everyone’s thoughts, at every second of the day, everywhere”, you’d probably have to spend roughly 65 hours a day on the site to get a real feel for that.

I wasn’t going to write about this. . . . But when days went by and this didn’t make headlines, when it just went unremarked, it began to really bother me. This sort of thing should still make the news. People should still be disgusted enough by this at least to say, loudly, “That is disgusting”—and to remind people like Elon Musk that he’s now an American, and Americans don’t laugh and banter with Nazis. We hang them at Nuremberg.

One of the main reasons why Musk is so dangerous and why he should be loudly called out is because his megaphone of hatred and bigotry can reach into every fetid, abhorrent corner of the world.

[I]f you don’t use Twitter, you don’t realize how big Elon Musk’s vuvuzela is, or what it means when he signals approval to other users by liking, responding, or retweeting their comments. . . .

When Musk calls attention to someone that way, he makes them famous, immediately. It directs a human tidal wave of attention—some 140 million Elon Musk fans—to their accounts. . . .

Usually, Musk doesn’t explicitly endorse the most outrageously antisemitic thing the outrageous antisemite has said. He likes or retweets or responds to something that, taken independently, is just ambiguous enough that it might be hard to construe it as antisemitic if you were, for example, an irretrievable imbecile. [*]

But Musk has turned all of Twitter into a giant engine for knowing what Musk is thinking, at all times. It’s inescapable. This means that every time Musk “likes” an antisemitic account, or replies, “concerning!” to one of its lunatic claims, some 140 million aimless, vague, discontented young men learn all about this fascinating theory that Jews secretly rule the world. . . . [For those that have heard all this before,] how exciting it is to them that now, it’s mainstream. It’s all over Twitter! Elon Musk is letting us tell the truth, at last, about the Jews! . . .

In terms of cultural influence, you could say that “trending on Twitter” is what “being on the front page of The New York Times” used to be. Maybe. I don’t know how else to explain the significance of it.

*: Similar to another thin-skinned promoter of racism and violence, Donald “Yo Semites” Trump.

Then Berlinski posted approximately 50 screenshots — “a small sample of what I—and the whole world—saw the moment we opened the app and looked at the ‘Trending Topics.’ It lasted for a good 72 hours.”

Then she detailed what happens when someone “reports” a tweet that has clearly violated the site’s terms of service, which Berlinski also posted, so there is no confusion.

Spoiler: You’re better off yelling your complaint into your kitchen sink’s drain. Literally any antisemitic or pro-Hitler or genocide-supporting message or meme is allowed. Good luck finding any evidence to counter that statement.