Holding the Strings in Our Hands
Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr. Make Use of Antisemitic Tropes in their Conspiracies
Elon Musk does not like the Anti-Defamation League. That, in and of itself, is no big deal. I’m not crazy about the ADL, either, for a number of reasons, chief among them its accusation that criticizing Israel is the same as criticizing Jews.
But there is something ugly about Musk’s distaste for the organization. It appears deeper than a fair and reasoned consideration of the ADL’s posture on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement or Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. For Musk, it appears both personal and something more, a melding of personal anger over the ADL’s criticism of his social media platform X with the historical scapegoating of Jews and the argument that Jews control things from behind the scenes.
I should define what I mean by antisemitism, so it is clear what it is and is no. Antisemitism is more than hatred of Jews. It is the attribution of specific qualities and powers to the Jewish people, a conspiratorial take on who we are and what we believe. Historically, it has included the “blood libel”1 — the rumor that Jews were kidnapping Christian children, killing them, and using their blood in matzoh — and “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”2 — an long-debunked antisemitic tract that started circulating in Russia in the late 19th Century and continues to be circulated among White Supremacist groups.
Criticism of Israel or Jewish organizations3, in and of itself, is not antisemitic. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been growing more and more authoritarian, and his government’s treatment of its Palestinian citizens and those living in areas under occupation is not dissimilar from the South African apartheid regime.4
Musk had a right to criticize the ADL — he says it is organizing actions designed to drive users and advertisers away from X (his ridiculous rebrand of Twitter). Where his attack on the organization veers into antisemitic rhetoric is the way in which he frames it. The ADL, in his narrative, is a kind of puppet master pulling strings and making advertisers dance, turning them away from X with the express purpose of damaging the site and Musk. It is somehow all powerful and controls the money.
It’s an old story, one that echoes ancient tropes about Jews and money, tropes that feature in the Protocols, in attacks on the Rothschilds, on George Soros, on Hollywood, etc. It is the Jews, according to the ancient libels, who operate behind the scenes, who orchestrate political and economic trends to the benefit of Jews or particular Jews.
Musk’s accusation may not be directly antisemitic, but it traffics in these images, uses them the way all powerful men have used antisemitic tropes throughout history — to obscure their own failure. Musk has taken a succession, if unpredictable social media platform and turned into a swamp of right-wing conspiracy, dicing, and general abuse — all in the name of free speech. This value, of course, does not apply to his critics, who find themselves exile from X when they piss off the great man.
I’m not arguing that Musk is an antisemite. I don’t know him, or what’s in his heart or mind.5 What I can say is that Musk — like Donald Trump — uses antisemitic symbols and dallies with antisemitic allies. And he is part of a much larger problem of normalized hate on the right and among conspiracists more generally. He is part of a larger network of those who traffic in theories that rely on antisemitic and racist tropes.
Robert Kennedy Jr., for instance, son of the former U.S. attorney general and New York senator and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, claimed during a press event in New. York (captured on tape by The New York Post) that “There is an argument that (COVID-19) is ethnically targeted.”
COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.
We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.
No there isn’t. And, no, Kennedy’s comments may not be “directly” antisemitic — but they swim the same waters in which Musk swims. As the Post wrote,
Kennedy’s remark echoes well-worn anti-Semitic literature blaming Jews for the emergence and spread of coronavirus which began circulating online shortly after the pandemic broke out, according to The Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at the University of Tel Aviv’s 2021 Antisemitism Worldwide Report.
A 2020 Oxford University study found nearly 1 in 5 British people believed Jews created the coronavirus pandemic for financial gain.
Jonathan Weismann in The New York Times, added that “Kennedy’s remarks about Ashkenazi Jews hit antisemitic tropes on multiple levels.”
Ashkenazi Jews generally descend from those who settled in Europe after the Roman Empire destroyed the Jewish state around 70 A.D. Sephardic Jews went to the Middle East, North Africa and Spain.
The idea that Ashkenazi Jews are somehow separate from Caucasians has fueled deadly bigotry for centuries, and the conspiracy of Jewish immunity from tragedy has been part of antisemitic attacks as far back as the Black Plague and as recently as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
This is fringe stuff, to be sure, but the fringe does appear to be growing, weakening the general (though shockingly recent) proscription against antisemitic language and behavior among what we’ll call polite society. Fox News, Trump, Musk, candidates like Kennedy, and the actions and language of so many in the House Republican caucus are giving conspiracies the oxygen they need to grow and the exposure they need to spread. The firing of Tucker Carlson earlier this year does not abrogate Fox’s responsibility for Carlson’s spreading of the “great replacement theory” or giving Carlson’s time slot to the equally slimy Jesse Watters. This kind of conspiracy mongering — around Covid, immigration, Joe Biden, Antifa — is the “news” channel’s bread and butter. That there are more extreme examples of this kind of nonsense — Newsmax, Breitbart — does not let Fox off the hook.
I don’t want to overplay this hand, but it is difficult not to given the real-world impacts it has had. Various studies demonstrate an increase in antisemitic activity, though the reliability of the data must be questioned because it is difficult to define what constitutes actual antisemitic behavior. These studies, though, do offer at least some empirical evidence that these things are happening.
And we know they can be deadly. The Pittsburgh massacre, the Poway synagogue shooting, the hostage standoff at a Texas synagogue are extreme examples of how these conspiracies can play out. We know that the man who massacred 11 Jews in Pittsburgh chose his target because he believed in the “grand replacement theory” touted by Carlson and circulating on the fringe for decades.
We can connect the dots — from fringe ideas, to mainstream platforming through Musk and Fox and Trump into our politics and ultimately into action. This is how real antisemitism seeps into the mainstream and metastisizes like the cancer it is.
Schwartz, Madeleine. “The Origins of Blood Libel.” The Nation, 15 Feb. 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-origins-of-blood-libel/. Accessed 13 Sept. 2023
“Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Holocaust Encyclopedia, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d., https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion. Accessed 13 Sept. 2023
I am thinking here of AIPAC and the ADL. AIPAC — the America Israel Political Action Committee — is no different in its aims than any other PAC. It seeks access to power, the ability to draft legislation and set policies, just like the National Rifle Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, or the Sierra Club. U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s criticism of AIPAC several years ago was not off-base, though her framing and language did fall into the use of antisemitic tropes, and she did apologize.
There was no need for U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal to apologize for making this analogy recently. (https://jayapal.house.gov/2023/07/16/jayapal-statement-on-israel-comments/)
The fallacy of intent or intention was outlined in a 1946 paper by W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and C.M. Beardsley. In it, Wimsatt and Beardsley, writing about literary criticism, questioned our ability to go beyond the words on the page or beyond the work, because “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work.” Digging through other primary sources — letters, journals, interviews — can provide only a dim understanding of what might have been going through the mind of the writer at the time of creation. This does not mean, I think, that we cannot place literary works and other art into the context of the times in which they were created — but that is another essay. I do find their argument about intent, and our inability to suss it out, compelling. See: Wimsatt, W. K., and M. C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (1946): 468–88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27537676.