@breakingbaht, an X user who goes by the screename “The Artist Formerly Known as Eric,” attracted viral attention yesterday for an antisemitic tweet Elon Musk endorsed.
@breakingbaht wrote that Jewish communities were pushing “dialectical hatred” against whites and that he wasn’t interested in giving “the tiniest shit” about Western Jewish people “coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”
“You have said the actual truth,” Musk replied.
“The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel,” Musk continued. ”This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop.”
Musk didn’t clarify which minority groups he thought were a primary threat and needed to be criticized, but in the context of the discussion and the Israel-Palestine war, it’s likely a reference to Muslims and Arabs.
“You right that this does not extend to all Jewish communities, but it is also not just limited to ADL,” Musk said in another tweet.
“And, at the risk of being repetitive, I am deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind,” Musk said. “I’m sick of it. Stop now.”
Musk and @breakingbaht were referencing a common idea in more radical right-wing circles that flirt with antisemitism that the ADL and other Jewish groups push “hatred” against whites by criticizing racists and antisemites, and by some of their involvement in refugee resettlement programs in the West.
Robert Bowers, for instance, who massacred eleven people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, said he was motivated by an opposition to HIAS, a Jewish-American refugee resettlement agency, claiming they “bring invaders in that kill our people.”
After coming under the spotlight of a slew of journalists and progressives on X, @breakingbaht clarified his message by challenging the idea that “whites can never have any form of identity group or movement again because of any violent white identity group …. Did blacks have to shut down the entire black rights movement due to the Panthers?”
“What I criticized is groups like the ADL, activists, and journalists who push anti white propaganda,” he wrote in another tweet. “Jewish people are not bad, in any ‘conspiracy,’ or any other stupid nonsense. It’s simple myopia. Anyone who misrepresents my opinion has plenty of chance to see follow-ups clarifying this. They simply choose not to because labeling someone who’s defended Jewish people their whole life as a ‘Nazi’ fits their childish worldview.”
But despite posting tweets affirming a Jewish right to self-defense, he also claimed that Jewish activists were playing a role in whipping up hatred against white people.
In one tweet, he claimed Jewish-based activism was trying to “unofficially start” a white holocaust in the U.S. “to the best of their ability.”
“Every major institution in the West has been manufacturing anti-white hit pieces for years,” he claimed in another tweet.
“I support Jewish people’s right to self defense literally and ideologically,” he said in another tweet, “But I also, as a white person, have to acknowledge that it’s been depressing to see Jewish communities not take a stronger stance against anti white dialecticism that is basically just repurposed antisemitism.”
His basic line is that he isn’t a racist, but is actually fighting against racism by pointing out Jewish efforts in the United States to attack white people, as well as highlighting his belief that “hordes” of minorities are actually the biggest threat to Jews in the country.
The thinking, which is common on both the mainstream and fringe conservative movement in the United States, is at least partially inspired by a former Reagan administration member turned internet radio polemicist who went by the name Robert Whitaker. Whitaker, whose real name was revealed to be Tim Murdock by an SPLC investigation, pushed a document called the “Mantra” which popularized the phrase “anti-racist is code word for anti-white.”
That phrase flipped the idea of anti-racism, a movement that seeks to address racial hatred, on its head, claiming it was in fact a sinister movement aimed at undermining white people by making them feel guilty for “natural” feelings like racism.
Elements of the theory are now repeated by right-wingers like influential conservative pundit Tucker Carlson and Turning Point USA president Charlie Kirk.
Musk has also recently tweeted in favor of Israel and against critics of the state.
“‘[D]ecolonization” necessarily implies a Jewish genocide, thus it is unacceptable to any reasonable person,” he wrote in response to one tweet calling decolonization “the woke version of jihad.”
Musk’s comments, though, provoked a tacit acknowledgment and pushback from X CEO Linda Yaccarino in a tweet.
“X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board — I think that’s something we can and should all agree on,” Yaccarino wrote without mentioning Musk. “When it comes to this platform — X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination. There’s no place for it anywhere in the world — it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop.”
