Opinion
Right-wing pundits and some mainstream reporters have grilled progressive candidates over controversial views expressed by leftist streamer Hassan Piker, but there’s been relatively little effort to hold Republicans accountable for their continuing embrace of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, despite his record of promoting racist and inflammatory anti-immigrant views.
“Why do we tolerate Elon Musk’s racist commentary?” asked New York Times writer Jamelle Bouie a few weeks ago:
Musk spends a large part of his free time fomenting violence and spreading the same hateful ideology that motivated some of the deadliest shootings and attacks ever to happen on American soil. It is that fact, and not the cars he builds or the rockets he launches, that ought to define his place in public life.
One answer to the question, at least when it comes to the Republican Party, is money. Musk’s Super PAC is preparing to spend more than $100 million to help Republicans try to hold onto their congressional majority. That’s on top of more than $250 million it spent to put Trump back in office. Some of Musk’s money comes from U.S. taxpayers in the form of huge government contracts.
Speaking of money, on Monday, the Republican National Committee made Musk the subject line of a fundraising email: “Elon crunched the numbers…” The body of the email featured a photo of Musk as part of a graphic that read, “Elon’s Election Fraud Alert.”
The RNC was using Musk’s name to promote bogus Trump claims about election fraud that the GOP cites as justification for trying to make it harder for some people to vote:
Elon crunched the numbers…
Millions of illegal immigrants.
Zero Voter ID laws.
Infinite mail-in ballots.
Dozens of rigged electoral maps.
And there’s only ONE answer that made sense:
The Democrats are FLAT-OUT RIGGING our elections, and the SAVE America Act is the ONLY way to stop it!“IT MUST BE DONE OR DEMOCRACY IS DEAD” – Elon Musk
Where are all the calls for RNC officials and Republican members of Congress to disavow Musk and his extremism?
While Musk called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down protests against ICE brutality in Minnesota, researchers from the Center for Countering Digital Hate say he used his X account to amplify anti-immigrant sentiment that led to mob violence in Belfast in June.
Earlier this year, the Guardian noted Musk’s “fixation” on race and reported that he had “made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January.” In April, the Washington Post noted that Musk was posting “near daily” about race and the supposed threat of a genocide against white people, leading one commentator to tell the paper that Musk’s recent statements had left “no doubt he’s a white nationalist.”
Musk has also promoted far-right parties in other countries, which The Nation characterized last year as Musk “pushing for global neo-Nazi regime change.”
In his NYT column, Bouie noted that Musk has repeatedly used his massive social media platform to promote the idea of dealing with “traitors first, then invaders”—which Bouie connected to the concept of “race traitors” demonized in the Turner Diaries, a book that fantasizes about white nationalist political violence.
Bouie also noted that Musk has promoted the movie “Citizen Vigilante.” In a recent interview, Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, called it “irresponsible” for Musk to promote the movie, which she said “glorifies the murdering of a Muslim immigrant family.” Musk responded, “It’s worth watching.” He reposted someone who wrote that people “complaining that [the lead character] spends the first half of the movie murdering white people not migrants” are missing the point: “Always hang a traitor before you shoot an enemy.”
Musk posted “Deal with traitors before invaders” a few days before he asserted that anyone who opposes remigration—a far-right term for forcing nonwhite people to leave western countries—a traitor.
Is there anything Musk could say or do that would lead Republican leaders to denounce him?
Yes, it might be uncomfortable for Republicans to disavow Musk’s extremism when it is so aligned with the White House: when immigrant sentiment is a primary driver of policymaking, when the only refugees the Trump administration is willing to admit to the U.S. are white South Africans, and when the MAGA movement is waging a war on anything deemed to be “woke.”
But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be asked.