Elon Musk is in Israel, where the Netanyahu government is rolling out the red carpet for him less than two weeks after he tweeted something so antisemitic that multiple major companies pulled advertising from X, formerly known as Twitter. The visit is also just days after a brazenly racist tweet from Musk that has drawn much less attention.
On Nov. 15, Musk responded, “you have said the actual truth” to a tweet accusing “Jewish communities” of pushing “dialectical hatred against whites” in support of “hordes of minorities.” That drew widespread outrage. Ten days later, Musk tweeted a disgustingly racist image:
If it’s not immediately obvious what’s going on here, at the top, the left image is apparently from the video game Diablo 4, depicting a demon attack. The right image is apparently a porn meme—an introductory image to a group sex scene involving a racist trope. (I am choosing my words very carefully here.) The bottom image is, of course, a widely used meme from “The Office” being used to equate a video game demon attack and interracial group sex, specifically an image drawn directly from the porn industry practices in which, in the words of independent pornographer Vex Ashley, “black male performers have to conform to a particular racist stereotype of what sex with a black man is and means.”
The pornography industry produces content treating Black men as hypersexualized in a way that is degrading to white women and men. It is “built on the same damaging tropes that led to the lynching of thousands of Black men in this country in the past,” Judith Ohikuare wrote for Refinery29 in 2017. Black men are viewed as threatening to whiteness. That’s why white adult film actresses are regularly paid more to do scenes with Black men—because that view holds not only in the scenes themselves, but in real life. A white woman having sex with a Black man is often depicted as emasculating white men, because the white woman has simultaneously degraded herself by association with Blackness and experienced (according to the stereotype) the Black man’s more impressive sexuality, leaving the white man in the dust. That’s the context for this image and its comparison to being annihilated by demons.
This tweet from Musk doesn’t spell out the underlying bigotry in quotable words like appending “the actual truth” to blaming Jewish people for “dialectical hatred against whites.” It has a video game shitposter feel rather than a pseudo-intellectual feel, so maybe it’s easier to write off as “humor.” But it’s just as ugly.
This kind of stuff, coming from the absolute top, is a big part of how the former Twitter was transformed into what Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo described as the "global sewer" that is the current X. Musk’s businesses, meanwhile, continue to get billions in U.S. government funding.
Campaign Action
