The White House accused Elon Musk on Friday of making a “pathetic advertisement for anti-Semitic and racist hatred” in one of his publications on his social network X, formerly Twitter.
The billionaire on Wednesday responded to the owner of an account who wrote that Jewish people were promoting “hatred against white people” with the message: “You told the exact truth.”
For the White House, the publication merely reiterates a conspiracy theory popular among white nationalists that Jews have a secret plan to encourage illegal immigration to Western countries to undermine the white majority there.
This conspiracy theory was particularly taken up by the perpetrator of the attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, in which eleven people died.
“It is unacceptable to repeat the vile lie that led to the deadliest act of anti-Semitism in American history,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement regarding the attack.
After his initial response, Elon Musk went on to claim that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an association dedicated to combating anti-Semitism, “unfairly attacks a majority of the West, even though the majority of the ‘West’ supports the Jewish people of Israel.”
“This is because, according to their own principles, they cannot criticize the minority groups that pose the greatest threat to the Jewish people,” he added.
The ADL is one of the NGOs denouncing a significant increase in disinformation as well as homophobic and racist insults on X, as the moderation rules there changed when Elon Musk took office.
The owners of Tesla and even SpaceX had already attacked the ADL in early September, claiming that the company was “responsible for the majority of X’s loss of income.”