The Hebrew Immigrant Support Society “likes to carry invaders in that kill our folks… Screw your optics, I’m moving into.” These had been the final phrases posted on-line by Robert Bowers earlier than he massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. It was the only deadliest anti-Semitic assault in American historical past. In earlier postings, Bowers defined the grievances that led him to commit mass homicide. He shared meme after meme asserting that Jews had been conspiring to flood the nation with brown folks with the intention to oppose and displace the white race. “Open you Eyes!” declared one, “It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Nation!”

On Wednesday evening, the world’s wealthiest man affirmed this identical conspiracy principle on X, previously Twitter, the social media web site he owns. Like so a lot of Elon Musk’s acts of self-immolation, it occurred within the area of a tweet. The incident started with a publish from a conservative Jewish person, who complained about anti-Semitic content material on social media throughout the present Gaza battle. “To the cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the web and posting ‘Hitler was proper,’” he wrote, “You bought one thing you need to say? Why don[’]t you say it to our faces.” A small-time white nationalist account quickly responded by attributing this anti-Semitism to minorities, and blaming it on the Jews:

This alternate would have languished in obscurity had Musk not replied to this bigoted bromide with six phrases: “You will have mentioned the precise fact.”

It mustn’t must be mentioned, however sadly it does: Jews—a famously fractious folks that features Jared Kushner, George Soros, Invoice Maher, and Noam Chomsky—would not have a shared consensus, not to mention a collective conspiracy to subordinate white folks by immigration coverage. And even when there have been a unified Jewish agenda, it could make completely no distinction. That’s as a result of, opposite to deranged delusions of anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists, public coverage just isn’t set by the 0.2 p.c of the world inhabitants that’s Jewish, however by the 99.8 p.c that isn’t.

All of those fundamental details someway escaped America’s most well-known entrepreneur.

Over an hour later, after it turned clear that Musk’s missive was doing profound harm to his already dented popularity, the billionaire tried to wash up his claims concerning the Jewish neighborhood’s perfidy by saying that he was solely referring to the Anti-Defamation League—as if being anti-Semitic in direction of one group of Jews is someway much less objectionable. (It’s not.) In any case, the walkback lasted 5 minutes. After one other critic complained that it was “not honest to say or truthful to say that ‘Jewish communities’ promote dialectical hatred in direction of white,” Musk replied: “You[’re] proper that this doesn’t prolong to all Jewish communities, however it is usually not simply restricted to ADL.”

None of that is new. It wasn’t the primary time Musk had echoed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories from his social-media bubble. And it wasn’t the primary time he’d blamed anti-Semitism on Jewish actions, pinning the unfairness on its victims. After months of marinating in probably the most conspiratorial cesspools of his personal web site, Musk arrived right this moment at his inevitable vacation spot.

However simply because Musk’s affirmation of white-nationalist ideology was the unsurprising end result of his on-line radicalization spiral doesn’t make it any much less devastating—or harmful. Anti-Semites imagine {that a} miniscule Jewish minority controls the route of the non-Jewish majority. However the fact is the alternative: The destiny of the tiny Jewish neighborhood rests within the fingers of non-Jewish society. Whether or not the anti-Jewish concepts of Musk and others turn into the brand new regular is lower than Jews; it’s as much as everybody else.