November 29, 2023

YOU WILL BE WHATEVER THE NARRATIVE NEEDS YOU TO BE: How Elon Became an ‘Antisemite’: ‘Tristram Shandy’ is the press’s handbook for whipping words to obey a narrative.

Major papers like the Journal, New York Times and Washington Post report that advertisers are again fleeing the service previously known as Twitter because, these papers explain, owner Elon Musk endorsed “an antisemitic post.” But try confirming for yourself that the post was intelligibly antisemitic or intelligibly anything else for that matter.

The perplexing issue is the noun. A user @breakingbaht expressed a lack of sympathy for “Jewish communities” (emphasis added) that allegedly encouraged “the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them” while supporting immigration of “hordes of minorities.”

After Mr. Musk responded “You have said the actual truth,” the New York Times cited equally undefined “Jewish groups” as detecting in the original tweet a common antisemitic trope. In one Times account, the phrase “Jewish communities” was transmuted into “Jewish people.” By the end of the week, without any new information being added, the Washington Post was reporting with unqualified confidence that Mr. Musk had given his “endorsement of comments alluding to the great replacement theory—a conspiracy theory espoused by neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville in 2017 and the gunmen who killed people inside synagogues in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, Calif., in 2019.”

That’s 37 words of interpolation for a six-word tweet. Mr. Musk and the original tweeter heatedly denied antisemitic intent. The Journal examined the context and suggested Mr. Musk was really exercised about a specific Jewish group, the Anti-Defamation League, which has largely adopted the identitarian and censorship agendas of the progressive left.

Related:

Of course, we know he’s not actually an anti-semite. If he were, these people would be defending him.

Posted at 11:55 am by Glenn Reynolds